Politicization of Ecological Issues : From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives 9781119649700, 1119649706, 9781786304810

Table of contents :
Content: Introduction vii Chapter 1. How Can We Study Environmental Policies? 1 1.1. Interests and limits of an approach to the environment through policy instruments 2 1.2. Defining the environment 6 1.3. Perception of environmental forms and motives 8 1.4. Perception of institutions in the environment 15 1.5. Emerging environmental policy issues 20 Chapter 2. Politicization and Institutionalization of the Environment 23 2.1. Environmental motives between singularity and generality 23 2.2. Putting motives into politics by greening 26 2.3. Frames of environmental forms: the contributions of political ecology 31 2.4. Stabilization of patterns by co-production 41 2.5. A framework for analyzing the politics of environmental motives 43 Chapter 3. Stabilized Motives of Freshwater Quality Control in Europe 49 3.1. The environmental motives of freshwater control policy 50 3.1.1. Self-purification and the sacrificed river, motives for authorizing polluting discharges 53 3.1.2. Fish mortality, a conservative motive for banning pollution 59 3.1.3. Trout, an ambiguous motive between liberalism and nationalism 65 3.1.4. Migratory fish as a motive for banning dams 70 3.1.5. Eutrophication, a European motive 75 3.2. Use of environmental motives in political work 79 3.2.1. Adjustment of political work to the consistency of the environmental motives of the water police 81 3.2.2. Plurality of ontologies of environmental motives in water policing 82 3.2.3. Modalities for implementing the environmental motives of the water quality control in politics 85 Chapter 4. Motives Under Discussion in Two Water Agencies 89 4.1. The water agencies model 92 4.2. Two water agencies as reflected by their institutional and environmental motives 99 4.2.1. Policy divisions between Seine-Normandie and Rhone-Mediterranee and Corse 100 4.2.2. Containment or generalization of the motive for cash flow constraint 103 4.2.3. The crystallization of the Rhone River motive 109 4.2.4. The politicization of the Paris conurbation's motive 113 4.3. Use of motives in political work in both agencies 117 Chapter 5. Motives for Anticipating the Ecological Crisis 123 5.1. The theory of ecological modernization and its motives 124 5.2. The forum for political ideas on the ecological crisis 130 5.2.1. Mapping of the intellectual forum in sociology and political science on the ecological crisis 131 5.2.2. Forum dynamics 134 5.3. The Anthropocene motive 137 Conclusion 143 References 159 Index 185

Citation preview

Politicization of Ecological Issues

“by simply throwing your mind open and letting the readymade phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you” George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946

Series Editor Bernard Reber

Politicization of Ecological Issues From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives

Gabrielle Bouleau

First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA

www.iste.co.uk

www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2019 The rights of Gabrielle Bouleau to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019940903 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78630-481-0

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

Chapter 1. How Can We Study Environmental Policies? . . . . . . .

1

1.1. Interests and limits of an approach to the environment through policy instruments . . . . . . . 1.2. Defining the environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3. Perception of environmental forms and motives 1.4. Perception of institutions in the environment . . 1.5. Emerging environmental policy issues . . . . . .

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2 6 8 15 20

Chapter 2. Politicization and Institutionalization of the Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

2.1. Environmental motives between singularity and generality 2.2. Putting motives into politics by greening . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3. Frames of environmental forms: the contributions of political ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4. Stabilization of patterns by co-production . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5. A framework for analyzing the politics of environmental motives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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31 41

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Chapter 3. Stabilized Motives of Freshwater Quality Control in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

3.1. The environmental motives of freshwater control policy . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1. Self-purification and the sacrificed river, motives for authorizing polluting discharges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2. Fish mortality, a conservative motive for banning pollution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

50 53 59

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3.1.3. Trout, an ambiguous motive between liberalism and nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4. Migratory fish as a motive for banning dams . . . 3.1.5. Eutrophication, a European motive . . . . . . . . . 3.2. Use of environmental motives in political work . . . . 3.2.1. Adjustment of political work to the consistency of the environmental motives of the water police . . . . . 3.2.2. Plurality of ontologies of environmental motives in water policing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3. Modalities for implementing the environmental motives of the water quality control in politics . . . . . .

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65 70 75 79

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Chapter 4. Motives Under Discussion in Two Water Agencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

89

4.1. The water agencies model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2. Two water agencies as reflected by their institutional and environmental motives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1. Policy divisions between Seine-Normandie and Rhône-Méditerranée and Corse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2. Containment or generalization of the motive for cash flow constraint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3. The crystallization of the Rhône River motive . . . . 4.2.4. The politicization of the Paris conurbation’s motive 4.3. Use of motives in political work in both agencies . . . .

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103 109 113 117

Chapter 5. Motives for Anticipating the Ecological Crisis . . . . . . .

123

5.1. The theory of ecological modernization and its motives 5.2. The forum for political ideas on the ecological crisis . . 5.2.1. Mapping of the intellectual forum in sociology and political science on the ecological crisis . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2. Forum dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3. The Anthropocene motive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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124 130

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131 134 137

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

143

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

185

Introduction

The environment is a favorable field for studying the difference between perceptions and representations, because environmental realities regularly surprise our senses and interpretations. Yet political science has long made the environment an issue “like any other”. Classically, it has approached environmental issues by studying how they were framed and supported by political actors, such as the debate on the future of natural sites, pollution, the living environment, etc. The issues were considered “environmental” when actors, especially ecological movements, defined them in this way. Nature was only seen as a social construction. From this perspective, environmental struggles and policies could be studied in the same way as other political conflicts, such as those on education, pensions, crime, housing assistance, etc. Recognizing the environment as having any political specificity was tantamount to taking sides in favor of environmentalism. However, environmental realities are intrinsically different from other social realities in their spatial dimension and their interactions with living things. Taking these characteristics seriously leads us to study the environment as an unstable and complex material context that political actors seek to circumscribe. In this undertaking, the spatiality and interdependence of environmental elements constitute particular resources to justify this or that framing of reality. Indeed, the contours of environmental categories include or exclude territories, which allows for particular modes of politicization. The environment’s reactivity with living organisms is manifested by singular processes that fall outside the established categories and create opportunities for repoliticization. The environment thus offers specific politicizing modalities. This book proposes a new approach to the

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environment to understand both what is political in the environment and how political activity transforms the environment. To do this, we rely on the notions of environmental forms and motives. Environmental forms are spatialized realities which we perceive as shapes in the environment. Environmental motives, on the contrary, are reasons to act in this area. However, the perception of shapes is not independent of motives. The word “motive” has the same etymology as “motif ”, such as the motif of a frieze or a fabric, which means a recurrent shape or a pattern. Recognizing both shapes and motives requires learning. Sociology has shown that legitimate motivations in a social context are limited in number. They are specific to each culture and each time. Love or interest are not necessarily recognized as credible drivers of individual action in all social groups. In Henry James’ short story “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), a character desperately seeks the hidden meaning of a novel. He hopes to discover a known shape. He expects this hidden meaning to suddenly jump out at him, like “a figure in a carpet”, i.e. an immediately recognizable shape. Both environmental shapes and motivational patterns are based on categorization conventions that lead to the inclusion of some things and the exclusion of others. Both motives and shapes are subject to moral and political interpretations. Shapes also have a social history and their symbolic significance depends on the normative investment they have undergone. It is common in environmental matters for the perception of a shape or the observation of its absence to become a cause of action. Finally, shapes and motives are useful to understand how actors categorize and interpret environmental realities whose contours are often contested. This book revisits the analysis of public environmental policies with these two notions of environmental shapes and motives by studying how actors struggle to impose legitimate motives based on shapes. We adopt a constructivist ontology by focusing our attention on the social processes of constructing reality, but without denying that the materiality of reality also influences perceptions. While there are situations where perception corresponds perfectly to a recognized shape, there are also cases where perceived reality is not coded in the individual’s representations. This mismatch allows the discovery or learning of any new shapes present. However, the relative autonomy of individuals’ sensory faculties from socially constructed categories is not enough to build a universally objectifiable reality that would lead us back to a premise of limited rationality. Our sensory faculties are used in social situations framed by

Introduction

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norms that influence the relevant scale, legitimate references and appropriate meaning. Indeed, since environmental shapes are inscribed in time and space, the perception of their contours is sensitive to the scale of observation and that of their temporal evolution depends on the reference situation considered. It is also sensitive to the different senses mobilized in perception (touch, smell, etc.) and to environmental investigation protocols. The political struggles whose stakes are the legitimate representation of the environment can thus be understood on the basis of the forms that each party tries to impose by setting the practical modalities of observation and their interpretation in terms of reasons for action. For example, in the French language, there is a term that exists: environmental motif. It captures both the motive for action on the environment and the forms on which it is based, which the English language distinguishes through the terms motives and patterns or shapes. The first chapter of this book situates the ontological positioning chosen here in the academic field of political sociology and demonstrates its methodological relevance for the analysis of public policies. We will thus specify what a perception-based approach can bring in addition to the mainstream approach based on policy instruments. We recall the origin of the notion of the motif (motive/pattern) in comprehensive sociology and discuss its links with the notion of affordance in pragmatic sociology. Our approach is also based on Virginie Tournay’s book Penser le changement institutionnel (Considering Institutional Change) (2014). The author considers that there are also focal point, observation scale and depth-of-field effects in the ways we approach institutions, and that this influences how we characterize their changes. She suggests that individuals perceive material clues of the presence of an institution (a flag, an alliance, a hymn, etc.), and that they infer logical links that depend on the relationship they have with that institution. If they adopt a distant relationship with the institution, they will be able to question its origin, forms and effects, just as a naturalist studies a living species, with observations that may vary according to the point of view. However, if they feel bound by this institution, questioning its origin and form will seem incongruous to them. What they will perceive, above all, is a bond of belonging as a totem (for a territorial institution, for example), an obligation towards a benevolent spirit (for a convention based on reciprocity, for example) or a proliferation of new links (like everything that is established in relation to a form of modernity).

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We will show that environmental motives can also be studied in a naturalistic way or experienced as totems, spirits or proliferation. The second chapter deals with politicization of environmental motives in a generic way, i.e. all motives (forms and motivations) perceptible in the space surrounding the actors, whether these motives relate to society or nature. It seems fruitful to us not to postulate an objective difference between the social and the natural environment but to observe how actors attribute biophysical causes or effects to deemed social motives in order to make them ecological motives. This leads us to approach greening as one of the forms of political work that can be done on a motive. We are mobilizing research in political ecology to identify other ways of politicizing the contours of environmental forms according to what they include or exclude and what their categorization puts in equivalence. We thus identify a typology of how political actors can use environmental forms and motives for their political work. In the rest of the book, we test the typology proposed in these first chapters to study changes of environmental policies in the long term. It is about paying attention to the environmental forms and motives that have been stabilized by their incorporation into public policies, their future over time and what they have changed for the actors. This approach is used in chapter three to study the evolution of fish and water quality control in Europe. This is a policy that has been very well documented by environmental historians. This longitudinal empirical study relates the institutionalization of six environmental forms that became motives for environmental action, from the 19th Century to the present day: the sacrificed river, self-purification, fish mortality, trout, migratory fish and eutrophication. Each case is both a shape and a source of motivation. Self-purification is a visible phenomenon downstream of a polluting discharge, and it is also an idealized vision of a nature that purifies. Migratory fish are forms that are well known to fishermen and are also a reason to oppose sectoral appropriation of rivers in the name of a European vision of rivers. As institutionalized environmental forms, they shaped the landscape. The material effects of the instituted motive are particularly evident in the example of the sacrificed river, which is not only a motive for justifying wastewater discharges into rivers but also materially translates into the existence of rivers without fish. The longitudinal study illustrates the evolution of the meaning of motives in the context of the policy instruments with which they are associated. Thus, the meaning of fish mortality changes

Introduction

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when sacrificed rivers are no longer legitimate. Trout does not mean the same thing when it is used as a currency of exchange in civil and criminal transactions and when it becomes an indicator for monitoring water quality. The appearance and disappearance of certain reasons reflects in the long term an evolution in the way ecological reasoning is taken into account in water policing. Throughout Europe, these six environmental forms and motives were incorporated into policy design in various combinations, in order to regulate discharges into rivers. The comparison reveals that there are different uses of such forms and motives in political work. The fourth chapter also discusses the use of environmental forms and motives in political work, but with an interest in contested forms and still-discussed motives, which have not yet been established as legitimate, stabilized and recognized patterns. These patterns, which can be described as “hot” as opposed to the “cold” patterns studied in the third chapter, do not have stabilized contours. They are defined or redefined at the same time as they are mobilized and challenged in action. The shaping of such motives is observed here through the discourse of two water agencies that do not have the same financing practices. We show how actors can fight with environmental forms and motives against worldviews that keep the environment at bay. The fifth chapter of this book discusses the political theories of environmental change. This international debate is structured around an opposition between technological modernism, ecological modernization and ecomarxism. We will show that a form-and-motive approach helps to identify the perceptions on which these theories are based, what constitutes their blind spots and the questions that remain open. We conclude with the interest of capturing the environment with forms and motives as it exists, by articulating scientific and lay perceptions, by focusing our attention on territorial scales and concrete objects. This approach also has a heuristic interest that goes beyond ecological issues. There is indeed a political responsibility to make certain forms more or less visible and to include or exclude certain realities in established motives. This leads us to emphasize the responsibility of the scientist in the reasons they choose to question.

1 How Can We Study Environmental Policies?

Environmental policies are difficult to circumvent. In a book on environmental conflicts in the Everglades, Gail Hollander (2008) shows that the opposition between environmentalists and sugar cane producers in Florida is not just a private conflict of interest, but that moral and political considerations on sugar have been at stake since the 18th Century. Florida’s sugar industry was indeed built as a condition for the political autonomy of the United States from the British, Spanish and French empires and then as a factor of political adherence to the country’s economic model when sugar became a key ingredient in mass-produced food. But to fully understand the success of this political economy, it is also necessary to study the competing products of sugar cane (sugar beet, sweeteners derived from corn), the strategies developed to fight cane viruses and the effect of the futures markets on sugar price volatility. Finally, this competition is not just about food. The governance of the sugar industry and its environmental effects in Florida now depends on the geopolitics of biofuels, which can also be produced with sugar cane. In the face of this network of interdependencies, how can we assess the importance of each of these factors on Everglades’ environmental policies? The proliferation of issues poses a methodological difficulty for any investigation into environmental politics. For the social sciences, it is not only a matter of identifying a theme or terrain, but also of constructing an object of analysis that is relevant to what the literature on the subject has highlighted. How to define this object of analysis? How can we make sure we do not forget any actor? Which scenes to observe? How far back in time

Politicization of Ecological Issues: From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives, First Edition. Gabrielle Bouleau. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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can we go? One solution consists of addressing them through policy instruments (laws, incentives, contracts, etc.) that have been adopted to regulate the environment. This makes it possible to abstract from the singularities of each issue in order to construct a general diagnosis on the evolution of environmental policies. However, as discussed in section 1.1, these governance tools reflect only a small proportion of political issues in an area that is difficult to govern (Weale 1992, Theys 2003). To fully understand the meaning that the environment has for actors, it is necessary to take better account of the ordinary categories that describe it and understand what makes them unstable, prone to controversy and uncertainty. This is the purpose of the rest of this chapter. 1.1. Interests and limits of an approach to the environment through policy instruments Two factors regularly reconfigure the networks of actors involved in the production of environmental policies and make it difficult to carry out an exhaustive investigation: the production of new knowledge1 and the instability of political agendas in the various political arenas of the territories concerned (Jordan 1998, Richardson 1994). There is no clear and sustainable convergence of interests in this area of public action. The environment concerns local residents, experts, industrialists (Bonnaud and Martinais 2017, Michel 2012), activists (Lascoumes 1994), elected officials, and others. Public action is highly fragmented; networks are complex and recompose over time. Political exchanges take place in mediation spaces that are difficult to observe, very diverse and sometimes informal, whose access is often controlled by a few actors (Gilbert and Henry 2012). It then becomes particularly tedious to assess the whole scope of a change by following all actors, whose involvement constantly varies in the manufacturing or implementation process of public policy. Studying actors does not make it possible to conclude in a general way on the results of their mobilizations: do the regulatory instruments adopted make it possible to reduce waste production and avoid pollution?

1 For example, the epidemiology of respiratory diseases has provided new resources for environmental actors to strengthen air quality regulation (Boutaric and Lascoumes 2008). In another field, Guerrin (2014) shows that the changes in scale of the hydraulic modeling of floods on the Rhone have redistributed the resources of the actors involved in renaturing the river.

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3

The study of policy instruments (Moisdon 1997, Lascoumes and Le Galès 2004, Linder and Peters 1990, Howlett 1991) may then appear to be the solution to overcoming the methodological difficulty associated with the dispersion of actors. An instrument (law, contract, consultation mechanism) is in fact a stable, instituted form, which offers a means of circumscribing the analysis. The construction of the instrument gives rise to official meetings with written records that make it possible to identify those present and those absent. Its content embodies the power relationships that forged it and conveys the frameworks that influence its implementation. The evolution of instruments is considered “an excellent indicator of change” in political relations and legitimacy (Lascoumes and Simard 2011). However, the instrument approach does not highlight a significant change in the way the environment is taken into account, whereas an approach based on environmental motives does. Within the European Union, the vast majority of environmental regulations are adopted at the European level and then transposed into a national law. What the authors who have studied the policy instruments show is that, at the European level, there have been no new instruments likely to give more power to environmental authorities (in particular more information) or to destabilize the vested interests of polluting industries (Halpern and Le Galès 2011). Environmental directives are a classic community decision-making process that produces uniform standards. Two developments limit their binding nature. On the one hand, the sanction for failure to achieve the objectives set by these directives remains dependent on the case law of the European Court of Justice. The first environmental convictions with financial penalties date back to the 2000s and concern directives adopted more than 10 years earlier2. France, for example, has been convicted several times for non-compliance with European environmental law, but none of these convictions has yet given rise to the penalties due in the event of “failing to comply with earlier judgments”. So far, France has managed to regularize its situation before a second conviction for the same offense3. The time lag between the adoption of a text at the European level 2 See, for example, Spain’s order of November 25, 2003 (C-278/01) to pay a penalty payment of €624,150 per year for each percentage of inland bathing areas not complying with the Bathing Directive 76/160/EEC. 3 This is the case in particular with the last conviction on September 4, 2014 (C-237/12) for non-compliance with the Nitrates Directive (91/676/EEC). France had already been condemned in 2002 for insufficient designation of vulnerable areas in the Bay of the Seine, but the case had been regularized.

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and the accountability of Member States for its effectiveness thus favors a slow and negotiated transcription at the national level. On the other hand, the obligations imposed by the directives are increasingly procedural. They define how to set objectives according to areas. The result is a “two-tier system of negotiation”, the European level for the adoption of directives and the national level for its implementation (Halpern 2011, Halpern and Le Galès 2011). According to Charlotte Halpern and Patrick Le Galès, this system has enabled national actors opposed to better environmental protection to negotiate the application of texts (by focusing on those that cost them little) without those procedures involving the public increasing, in return, the steering power of European institutions. They also note that the European level has not created specific instruments for environmental policy, but that it recycles instruments that have a history in a Member State. This is particularly the case for zoning, tax incentives and eco-labels, which were first introduced in France. Their generalization to the European Union would therefore not be a guarantee of change in France insofar as French actors have already implemented strategies to adapt to these tools. The authors then conclude that the European policy has little autonomy vis-à-vis member countries and international organizations that have also inspired most of its instruments. The instrument approach does not reveal any changes at the national level either. Rather, research concludes that neocorporate strategic logics are still at play (Nilsson 2005). Environmental policies would leave too much room for interpretation for actors, at the risk of no longer having an effect on the environment. Regulatory modes where economic sectors co-decide with public authorities are dominant (Barré et al., 2015, Rumpala 1999, Berny 2011, Larrue and Chabason 1998). Environmental issues would be aligned on managerial logics and diluted under the term sustainable development (Villalba 2009). Magalie Bourblanc has identified local public policies which, in order to reconcile environmental principles and principles of intergenerational equity between farmers, set up parallel accounting systems for agricultural land, which do not make sense even for the agents responsible for implementing them (Bourblanc 2011). Finally, the selective transcription of European directives negotiated at the national level would favor technical-managerial instruments mastered by the sectoral actors in place (coalitions between industrialists and major state technical bodies) or even neutralized by political will at the national or local level.

How Can We Study Environmental Policies?

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Scholars have also identified several mechanisms for neutralizing greening instruments. Some of them are at a very early stage of public action when defining the public problem at stake. Claude Gilbert and Emmanuel Henry (2012) have identified discrete scenes where the assignment of public problems to a particular department is played out, which subsequently provides officials in that department with a monopoly on legitimate expertise to select and implement appropriate policy instruments. Sectoral actors (agricultural, industrial, urban) are also able to divert regulatory instruments such as limit values (amount of pollution not to be exceeded) and zoning, by negotiating the nature of regulated discharges, exemptions (Bourblanc 2011) or more favorable implementation deadlines4. Neutralization (Le Bourhis and Lascoumes 2014) is also played out in the production of environmental information, in order to mask degradation diagnoses. To counter the monopolization of the definition of public problems, nature protection associations have called for an independent environmental information agency (Lascoumes et al., 2014). Several authors thought that the European Union would play this role, because of the obligation on Member States to provide environmental information available to the public, which would act as resources for mobilizing the judicial forum (Dezalay 2007, Kallis and Nijkamp 2000). However, an indicator on the state of the environment is not necessarily an indicator to protect the environment (Le Bourhis 2015). Unsustainability indicators constructed by the Institut français de l’environnement (IFEN) before 2007 were subsequently drowned in a bureaucratic statistical production in which it has become difficult to find resources for pro-environmental action. Even though some controversies testify to a wear and tear on technocratic strategies (Michel 2012, Sébastien 2013) and suggest that these neutralization mechanisms do not always work, the dominant observation in the literature is that of a strong inertia in favor of sectoral policies to the detriment of environmental action. The objectives of environmental policies would remain unclear, soft regulations and flexible trade-offs (Lascoumes 2012). However, this pessimistic observation by political scientists on the integration of environmental issues into public action is based on analytical tools that adopt an institutional definition of the environment, i.e. what is

4 The deferred definition of eutrophication-sensitive areas in the Seine basin is discussed in the following section.

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classified under environmental sections by law, professions or political organizations. Of course, these sections were standardized from ordinary categories for government purposes. The institutions that govern the environment, such as the Ministry of the Environment created in France in 1971, were built by aggregating these codified categories (preservation of the natural and cultural heritage, living environment, nature, pollution, risks, etc.), themselves based on inventories of species, objects and activities (Charvolin 2003). However, these inventories lose important characteristics of the environment, which are its dynamics and interdependencies (Carter 2018, Guimont and Petitimbert 2017). These definitions do not exhaust the diversity of things perceived in the environment and struggle to account for its presence, forms and consistency for the actors. 1.2. Defining the environment Institutions can be seen as both aggregating and integrating principles, i.e. both rules for allocating resources and legitimate ways of giving meaning to the collective and its context (March and Olsen 1989). We place ourselves here in the more integrative tradition of analyzing institutions to reflect an environment that can never be reduced to clearly identified resources. The environment includes nature, artifacts, human behavior and hybrid things. It is neither clearly defined nor bounded. Individuals can call on institutions whose role is both distributive and interpretative to bring order to this multiple reality. The challenge of this book is to understand how ordinary perceptions of the environment can influence public decisions and vice versa how public decisions can make some environmental realities more or less perceptible. To do this, we need to redefine the term “environment” to better grasp how actors experience and make sense of it. In everyday language, the environment is an ordinary way of capturing the space and temporality that surrounds us, without precise delimitation. It is a vague term that has the same root as the noun “environs”. Unlike other contextual terms such as “society”, “entourage” and “relatives”, which also lack precise boundaries, the environment is not restricted to humans and their interactions but includes “natural” elements, i.e. elements that, from the viewpoint of the

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observer, are at least partially escape human intention. We propose the following definition: DEFINITION 1.– Environment. The environment, for individuals or social groups, is the surrounding biophysical reality that we perceive through our senses, and which results from human and non-human actions. We can address the environment in general or focus on a specific one such as professional, family or natural environments. This definition of the environment as a perceived biophysical reality goes beyond the scope assigned to it in nature policy, but this expansion is necessary to understand what an environmental issue means for actors. Indeed, the distinction between society and nature is changing, so we need a definition of the environment that is not restricted to what is considered natural at a given time, but that accepts this distinction between natural and social as one of the characteristics of a given environment. What seems purely artificial and social here and today may be associated with ecological considerations tomorrow. For example, the pill has long been considered as a purely human and social issue. It is only recently that hormones used for female contraception have been accused of being endocrine disrupters for aquatic wildlife. Conversely, what is described as purely material and environmental also has a linguistic, and therefore social, existence. Although contingent, the ontological separation between the natural and the artificial is the most widespread way in the Western world to understand reality, as Philippe Descola states (2005). This “great divide” continues to have currency, not only in science. Overcoming this dichotomy, as Bruno Latour (1997), for example, proposes, requires us to get away from the meaning experienced by most individuals. This effort is never made on a routine basis, it requires an analytical effort. Our definition of the environment grasps altogether social and natural elements in any context. The biophysical reality perceived around the actors is not limited in space and time. The environment is not a well-framed object. Its division into categories is neither unambiguous nor perfectly stable. The social classifications that serve as benchmarks are often challenged. While polar bears and brown bears were considered as two distinct species, melting ice forces polar bears to move out of snow-covered areas, which favors a natural hybridization with brown bears. This has been observed since 2006 in the Canadian Arctic zone, whereas previously it had only been observed in zoos. The distinction between the two species is fading. Unlike a smartphone

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interface where each icon corresponds to one and only one application and has been designed to be immediately identified and distinguished by anyone, individuals do not perceive the same shapes in the environment. By changing the observation tool or conventional definitions, it is always possible to bring out realities in the environment that have not been perceived before. 1.3. Perception of environmental forms and motives People perceive concrete forms in the environment: objects, animals, plots, clouds, ponds, cracks, fissures, smells, color spots, textures, sounds and combinations of sounds, smells, textures, colors and flavors. All of these forms produce stimuli for an individual who will recognize them, put them in order and align them with known categories. These categorization operations are the result of learning and vary according to the socio-cultural context, and they can also be debated. Henry Dicks (2012) points out that the category is a way of showing something in the public space through language. Etymologically, the term comes from the Latin categoria, derived from the ancient Greek κατηγορία, katêgoria (“accusation, category”) derived from κατηγορέω, katēgoreō (“accuse, speak out against”) from κατά, kata (“against”) and ἀγορεύω, agoreuō (“speak”). The category is a way of seeing or accusing that confronts others in the public space through language. The categories used to describe the environment give meaning to material forms. The “river” category captures the continuity of water flowing through a valley, beyond the discontinuity of urban and rural areas, fast-flowing sections and slow waters. This “river” category also makes it possible to account for the physical discontinuity that separates two banks. To describe the environment, individuals have at their disposal a repertoire of forms (vocabulary of geography, flora, fauna, color chart, musical repertoire, etc.). They can learn to recognize these forms in the environment because they meet them several times. Forms repeat themselves; they look like a standard ideal. In English, a recurrent shape is called a pattern. In French, to capture an ideal type, whether in visual, textural, sonic or olfactory form, the term motif is sometimes used: a fabric motif or a musical motif. In this sense, an environmental motif is a form (figure, pattern) perceived in the living space. It may be a landscape motif (Béringuier et al., 1999), but here it is given a

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broader meaning to also include physical forms of the social environment (concrete marks of distinction, stigma, etc.). To share an environmental “pattern-motif ” with others, you have to name it. Learning the form is not just an intentional chain of events that classifies experiences according to linguistic entries5. The process of encoding this form is also part of the body of individuals and its recognition may become unintentional, even irrepressible, and therefore pre-interpretative. This is the case, for example, with reading. It is no longer possible for those who have learned to read to perceive letters without reading the words, because the writings are then part of a lived and incorporated environment. Learning environmental forms involves the education of the senses and language and becomes routine. The recognition of a “pattern-motif ” is a source of emotions. Consider Proust’s madeleine. Madeleine and herbal tea are tasteful motifs in the French culinary environment. This common reference makes the situation described by Marcel Proust in Du côté de chez Swann relatively familiar to the reader who is familiar with herbal teas and madeleines. However, only the narrator experiences such a strong and unexpected emotion in recognizing this motif that it opens the door to happy memories, closed for too long. Magnified by the novelist’s prose, the individual emotion becomes a collective aesthetic motif that in turn generates an emotion in the reader. Among naturalists, Rebecca Ellis observed how the senses of perception are sharpened by repeated observation. She explains that when amateur naturalists are able to identify a species at first glance, this rapid alignment between the known category and the being in question gives them a great joy that amateurs call among themselves the “jizz” (Ellis 2011). While administrative and scholarly discourses on the environment keep emotions at bay, it must be recognized that environmental forms can convey passions (Roux et al., 2009) and emotional logics (Bauman 2013).

5 In an article on the encoding work of a pedologist and a botanist in the Amazon, Bruno Latour shows that scientific production proceeds through a series of inscriptions according to conventions that only retain their truthfulness as long as the information circulates along the chain and its connections are not called into question (Latour 1993). We would like to emphasize here the interpretative work that this encoding requires in a reality that contains an element of ambiguity.

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Not all “pattern-motifs” are as recognizable as Proust’s madeleine, and reality often presents itself in equivocal contours. These ambiguities have delighted the authors of Gestalt theory who have become masters in the art of interweaving two forms in the same drawing to create an effect of surprise when the spectator who has recognized the first meaning discovers the second interpretation. More generally, in the environment, the association of a set of perceptions with a “pattern-motif” is never exclusive. Where some will associate the presence of a crowd with a political demonstration, others will see it as a gathering of no political significance. Interpretative plurality is the rule rather than the exception. There is room for debate, and individuals are not trapped in the forms they perceive irrepressibly6. Beyond first impressions, other continuities or discontinuities of reality can be highlighted individually or through debate because perception is objectifiable and sensitivity can be improved. In our example, the presence of banners with a political slogan or the concentration of crowds at the entrance to a shopping center may help to separate opposing perceptions. Emotions generated by “pattern-motifs” can give rise to private or public commitments and motives for action, in the sense of motivations. For ecologist John Muir (1838–1914), the fine texture of sheep’s wool was both a form and a reason to celebrate the superiority of wilderness over domesticated nature7. For biologist Rachel Carson (1907–1964), the silence of spring was not only a noticeable absence of birds, but also a cause for concern and mobilization against pesticides (Carson 1962). In Mouscron, Belgium, it was the desire to distinguish the olfactory motif produced by a slaughterhouse from that produced by an incinerator that motivated local residents to organize themselves into a network of “noses” that ensured vigilance over their local environment (Melard 2013). The notion of environmental motive thus makes it possible to grasp, on the one hand, the form and meaning (pattern) that the actors give to their environment (representations, arguments) and, on the other hand, the emotions and motivations (motives) that they associate with this perception.

6 In this respect, perceptions differ from Bourdieusian habitus, which is also socially acquired and incorporated, but which encloses the individual in a single interpretative scheme (Bourdieu 1987). 7 Muir, J. (1875). Wild wool. The Overland Monthly, April (Worster 1973).

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DEFINITION 2.– Environmental motive. An environmental motive is a form or set of forms perceived in the environment, with contours (discontinuities) and associated with representations, arguments, emotions and motivations. Individuals perceive environmental patterns by their shape(s) or outline(s). The outline of a shape pattern is defined by the limit of the extent beyond which its presence is no longer seen, felt or heard. Sometimes form is perceived first and motivation comes second. At other times, motivation reconfigures the perception of the environment. For those who are tired, any flat surface is perceived as a potential resting place. Motivation too is perceived because individuals have learned to associate it with patterns that reflect its presence. It has long been known that to understand the abstract motivations of others, i.e. their reasons for action, you need to know the codes of their social environment. For Max Weber, behavior is perceived by relating the elements that compose it to “a typical configuration of meaning” that constitutes its motivation, “its meaningful reason” in a particular context, “according to average habits of thinking and feeling” (Weber 2016, p. 104). Charles Wright Mills (1940) adds the inseparable link between the interpretation of conduct and language: “motives are words” (p. 905). According to Mills, a vocabulary of motives can be learned in a situation at the same time as behavioral norms. He quotes the adult who says to the child “do not do this, it is selfish”, linking in the same sentence the condemnation of an act and its imputation to a motivation. This vocabulary of motives constitutes the social environment in which we are caught. Even the sociologist is obliged to interpret the behaviors he observes according to the vocabulary of credible reasons available to society in general or to his profession. When a word provides a definitive answer to the question “why does such a person behave in such a way?”, it means that this word is part of the vocabulary of motives in the social group here considered. For example, we might say that such an action was done “out of love” or “for money”, “out of loyalty” or “out of revenge”. These motivations have a performative dimension when they are expressed. Presenting one’s actions with reference to the vocabulary of current motives “in force” makes them acceptable, reduces conflicts and ultimately facilitates their realization. We also become accountable for the motives we have

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verbalized because others will perceive our actions in relation to the motives posted. Mills believes that the vocabularies of credible motives have historically been located and compartmentalized in social structures. The well-framed traditional situations had their own sub-vocabulary of motives. However, modern urban life would be full of confusing situations where competing sub-vocabularies confront each other. To interpret the motivations of others, each actor should rely on socially recognized indices as specific brands of a type in the common repertoire. However, sociologists Mills and Weber have remained vague about the sensitive dimension of the perception of these clues. Although Weber talks about “average thinking and feeling habits”, he does not define what this sensitive perception of the situation is. What does it mean to feel in this case? To attribute a motivation to a behavior, is it enough to represent this behavior in a cognitive way or is it necessary to see, touch and hear it? When the adult says to the child “don’t do this, it’s selfish”, the child understands and learns what it means, because “it” refers to gestures, words, ways of interacting that both protagonists have seen, heard, felt at the same time in their lived space. Behavior and its qualification are interpretations based on a series of perceived cues. If Mills’ motives are abstract notions (love, hatred, jealousy, etc.), they are nevertheless identifiable in situation through forms (gestures, facial expressions, voice intonation, etc.) which are motifs in the sense of patterns. To perceive jealousy in others means that we identify in their physical and linguistic behavior forms that we interpret as envy. This interpretation is a learning process in which we can become a prisoner. Mills thus mocks the Marxist ideology that leads to perceiving the world only through struggles of interest: “to many believers in Marxism’s terminology of power, struggle, and economic motives, all others, including Freud’s, are due to hypocrisy or ignorance. An individual who has assimilated thoroughly only business congeries of motives will attempt to apply these motives to all situations, home and wife included” (Mills 1940, p. 912). To reflect the ordinary perception of the environment, we need both meanings of the term motif in French, both pattern and motivation. This term captures the perceptions on which individuals rely to categorize reality and the meanings associated with the presence (or absence) of these forms, whether they are related to attachment, fear or a norm. Compared to other

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categories of language that designate motivations (love, jealousy, punishment, etc.), “environmental motive” is a phrase that also explicitly designates a form (silence, the smell of the incinerator, the texture of the mouflon hair, trout, river, fire, oil slick, daisy field, grass, rubber, etc.). From an ontological point of view, the environmental motive is a social construction, but as we will see later, it carries a way of seeing and judging the environment that becomes routine. Furthermore, its institutionalization can have material effects on the environment. The link between observers and the material reality they perceive is a phenomenological experience that cannot be shared in the public space. This link has been well studied by pragmatic sociologists (Barthe et al., 2013) through the notion of “affordance”. This term was first used by psychologistethologist James Gibson (1977) to designate both the means by which a person (or an animal) can grasp a situation and what this situation offers to his perception. For example, a handle offers a grip to a human while it is less convenient for a cat. Under the hand that tries to grasp it, a handle may be too round or too big to grab. It is from the encounter between materiality and the individual’s intention that the grasp is born. Whether this affordance is deliberately “constructed” for a use or opportunely captured “in nature” for want of anything better does not have much importance in this conceptualization. It remains valid whether the reality is natural or artificial. The pragmatic environment is socionatural. For the climber, not all the roughness of the rock is a catch. They have in their head possible types of catches, but those that will really be useful will be revealed during the climb. The action reveals the gap that can exist between sensory perception in situations and representations. Affordance is a means of action that is recognized by devices of perception and understanding (hands, tools, representations, etc.) that are affirmed, sharpened and refined with experience. For its part, reality offers folds8, protrusions and interstices that more or less “bend” to the devices of perception and understanding of individuals. When sensory receptors and physical reality intertwine, folds offer a grip for the individual. Even for pragmatists, the individual is not alone in this exploration. Collective action sets conventional benchmarks on things to facilitate the articulation of perceptions and representations. In the environment, there are 8 The term is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze, who himself takes it from Leibniz (Bessy and Chateauraynaud 2014).

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often situations that do not correspond to those that have been socially identified. Benchmarks are not always enough and can also be misleading. Even where labels exist, Christian Bessy and Francis Chatauraynaud (2014) note that there are risks of error. It is then necessary to be an expert to avoid being “caught” by false labels on counterfeit products. Leaving behind the markers diverted by counterfeiters, experts manipulate objects and inspect them from every angle to perceive other characteristics (texture, sound, weight, etc.). The authors of Experts et faussaires (Experts and Counterfeiters) characterize expertise by the extent of the inventory of affordances that an individual has learned to recognize. Sensations that do not correspond to any sensory experience already experienced can disappoint an individual’s expectations and generate disorder or be used to support “increased vigilance of actors” or “investigation” (Ginelli 2015). To the extent that these discrete affordances do not necessarily have names in the social world, their identification is not only a matter of socially constructed dispositions but also of curiosity and attention to a wide variety of experiences. For Bessy and Chatauraynaud, the expert is the one who pushed the border between the known and the trouble. They describe the evaluation of authenticity as a back and forth between abstract representation that keeps the body at bay and the material experience that may take control over the subject (Bessy and Chateauraynaud 2014). Environmental motive is defined here not as material affordance, but its meaning. It is the meaning given to a perceived form and is therefore semiotic. This pragmatic perspective sheds new light on the way individuals perceive behavior in society. They capture the motivations of others through material affordances (e.g. upper body movement) that they attempt to match with a known benchmark (e.g. shoulder shrug). As a representation, this landmark is part of what Mills calls the cultural vocabulary of patterns. As a form with normative significance, shoulder shrugging is an environmental motive. You can live in a social environment that is more or less rich in shoulder shrugs. In some social environments, shoulder shrugging signifies offhandedness. But let us note that the two words are different. Offhandedness is a motivation. It is not an environmental motive, because it is not a form.

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1.4. Perception of institutions in the environment Often the term “perception” is used in political science as a synonym for “representation”. For example, in the model of Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith’s causal coalitions (1993), it is through internal conflict regulation through brokers that actors in very different positions gradually come to share “a belief system… causal assumptions and perceptions of the problem”9. These are common definitions that do not refer to sensory abilities. However, we can also further distinguish representations and perceptions by trying to understand whether there are material traces of the presence of institutions. Even when institutions are conceived as systems of meaning (March and Olsen, 1989), appropriate to certain situations and legitimate to guide collective action, they are not only “views of the mind”. Their maintenance is a matter of cultural transmission practices such as myths and ceremonies (Meyer and Rowan 1977), which in turn are based on concrete objects and ritualized physical places. Pierre Muller’s “referential”, which is a system of meaning “built by actors and which imposes itself on them as a framework for interpreting the world” (Muller 2005), is based not only on values, norms and algorithms but also on images that “make sense immediately without going through a long discursive detour. From this point of view, images constitute a central element of the frame of reference” (Muller 2006). He quotes: “the bearded terrorist, the dynamic and modernized young farmer, the American troops overthrowing the statue of the dictator”. These examples correspond well to what we have called environmental motives, located in the living space. These are both socially constructed categories, perceptible by the senses, and signs that motivate the fight against terrorism, the modernization of agriculture or adherence to American foreign policy. This suggests that institutions manifest themselves in the environment, in particular authoritative forms that help to frame the situation and guide the perception of other motives. Actors identify the relevant institutions through these canonical motives whose meaning refers to these institutions. This is also what Yannick Barthe and Cyril Lemieux suggest (1998) when they mention the importance of “making visible” what is not visible in 9 “advocacy coalitions (…) are people who share a particular belief system – that is, a set of basic values, causal assumptions, and problem perceptions” (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993, p. 25).

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order to transform the consideration of collective risks. According to these scholars, the challenge of political mobilization is “to shift the spontaneous perception of political decision-makers and journalists” to increase the visibility of victims. They support a conceptualization of institutions that would be built by organizing material perceptions, categorizing them and politicizing them. The legitimacy of the institutions thus constructed would be maintained by the obvious presence of objects directly associated with the institution (images, ritual objects, etc.). Without this material support, individuals would not perceive the meaning of collective rules. The hypothesis of a functional link between material perceptions and individuals’ adherence to institutions is explored in greater depth by Virginie Tournay (2014) in Penser le changement institutionnel. Virginie Tournay conceives institutions “not as fictions magically created by a glance, by a conscience or by a history (myth), but rather from their form of attestation and the traces they are likely to leave in the mind” (p. 20). The world is populated by elements that can be recognized and named by language, which our ordinary perception interprets as indicators of the presence of more abstract and less contingent realities and institutions. Sometimes they are pure symbols whose materiality does not matter (the colors of the flag). But other elements inseparable from their materiality and spatiality also have this symbolic power. A wedding ring on a finger makes the institution of marriage visible materially. The ringing of a bell at an educational institution reminds us via our ears to be punctual to lessons. What would quality certifications defined between stakeholders be worth if they were not visible through a label on products offered to consumers? The nation is not an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) made from nothing. The idea of the nation is constantly updated by its perceptible physical manifestations. The flag, symbolic places, language and patriotic songs are all environmental motifs of the nation. For Virginie Tournay, individuals constantly work to adjust their perceptual categories to “bring together the perspectives, contours, reliefs and contrasts of something familiar, in order to reconstruct a recognizable world” (p. 154). When a piece of the institutional puzzle is recognized, the individual reconstructs the continuity of the whole by assigning to this presence all the properties inherent to the institution. For the author,

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institution is a more perceptive than cognitive category. It passes into the register of representation through language. But this representation does not erase the perceived characteristics. In the idea of the nation, for example, the distinction between inside and outside is decisive. From this perspective, what makes an institution exist is precisely the ability of actors to attribute a normative meaning to a perceived thing or person: “[see] money [in] a piece of metal, a flag [in] a piece of cloth, (…) [and in a person] the postman, policeman…” (Tournay 2014). In this conceptualization, institutions have a certain consistency because of the physical, spatial and historical characteristics usually associated with them in language. “The consistency of the institution (…) is determined by language because the linguistic mode of existence of the institution allows different ways of articulating the elements of this being to form a totality” (Tournay 2014, p. 305). The consistency of institutions is not of the same nature as environmental forms. They are built beyond the material elements. They are always open in time or space, which makes them more general and more robust to criticism because they are less contingent and contextualized. Virginie Tournay designs four types of perceptual relationships with institutions, which she models by combining Philippe Descola’s ontologies (2005) and Charles Tilly’s explanatory registers (2006). For Philippe Descola, there are four ways of perceiving beings in the world: naturalistic, totemic, animic and analogical ontologies. Naturalist ontology pays attention to the visible characteristics of beings and refers to natural laws and cultural choices to understand their diversity. For Tournay, this ontology would correspond to the explanatory register by causal reasoning identified by Charles Tilly. Totemic ontology perceives in beings a clan identity. The differences in the appearance of non-humans correspond to differences between human clans. Tournay proposes to match this ontology to the explanatory register of Tilly’s founding myth. The animic ontology does not give importance to the form of beings but to their intentionality. Tournay articulates this ontology in the explanatory register of the exchange agreement. Finally, analogical ontology sees in beings the possibilities of relationships. Tournay associates it with the explanatory register of the prospective narrative. These four categories are summarized in Table 1.1.

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Interiority (elements of permanence)

Spatiality

Temporality

Explanatory register

Naturalist

Attributes defined by the observer

(What needs to be explained)

Variations due to cultural differences

Historical evolution following a founding project

Causal explanation

Animic

(Extremely varied)

Moral principle

Friendship, kinship, (citizenship)

(As long as these links hold)

Exchange agreement, reciprocal obligation

Identity

Unitary, territorial

Founding act

Rituals, codes, commemorations, founding myths, symbols

Looking to the future

Forward-looking story

Ontology

Physical properties

Totemic

Analogical

Indivisible

Overrun, network, crisis

Table 1.1. The consistency, temporality and explanatory register of institutions. 10 Adapted from V. Tournay (2014, p. 173, p. 190, pp. 258–259)

According to Tournay, to understand institutions in a naturalistic way is to be critical of them, not to believe in their permanence. This involves asking how and why individuals feel the presence of an institution. The naturalist observer always looks to an external cause (the actors, a myth, a lock-in process, a configuration) for what makes the institution stand. When explaining institutional evolution through the interplay of actors, the analyst gives actors their own ontology. Other analysts will take such actors’ strategies as a variable to be explained by values. The variations observed over time then generate questions about origin and history in an evolutionary conception of institutions. The changes can be explained according to the various neoinstitutionalist currents: one institution was born from a founding project (historical neoinstitutionalism), another is maintained because of inertia (paths of dependence) and a third appears following calculated reasoning (rational choice) or by social mimetism (sociological neoinstitutionalism). This naturalistic relationship to institutions opens up

10 Words in brackets have been added by the author.

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the emancipatory possibility of imagining other codes for living together. It is by comparing institutions with each other that we reveal their spatial outlines and historical evolutions. According to Tournay, individuals also perceive the presence of an institution when they feel obliged by a moral principle and a bond of reciprocal obligation. In such case, they apprehend this institutional obligation as an animistic ontology. Animic institutions are based on common definitions of good and evil and a convention of exchange within a group. They do not evolve over time once established. They are spatially manifested by bonds of friendship, kinship or belonging that make individuals feel solidarity with the institution. The public good and the general interest are animistic institutions. What makes these institutions tangible to individuals is the fact that they feel solidarity between citizens (beneficiary of the public good) or that they do not detect any obvious asymmetry in the way issues are handled (general interest). When individuals perceive a collective identity, such as the nation or regional cuisine, based on cues indicating the presence of this identity, what they perceive is an institution of the totemic type. It is based on codes, rituals, commemorations, founding myths and symbols. It is spatially deployed in a single scope, through a language or practices. For Tournay, the territory is the archetype of the totemic institution. Finally, the author proposes to report on relationships with emerging institutions, those perceived in a crisis situation without reference to traditions, to reflect a profusion of links to be built from a central point. These analogical or connexionist institutions rely on networks that are only activated in the event of an alert or emergency regime and are based on forward-looking, action-oriented narratives. The project is an example of an analogical institution. Although a project is constantly evolving, it is also conceived by the perceptions of its actors: its plans, its program, the statements made on its behalf, etc. In the examples cited by Virginie Tournay, signs that indicate the presence of an institution are not important. The flag, the alliance and the polling station are purely conventional. Only their meanings matter.

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The institution itself has a consistency but not really a precise outline. Even in the case of territory with a large spatial dimension, the outline remains unclear. According to Tournay, the attention paid to morphology is a naturalistic concern that indicates a step back. If we adhere to the institution, only its consistency counts and its contour fades. The ability of an institution to direct behavior does not result from its form but from the intentionality that actors attribute to it (animic ontology), the history they tell about it (totemic ontology) or the possibility it offers them to connect beings and things (analogical ontology). In the extreme, the most instituted realities no longer have any unambiguous relationship to their visible manifestations. Their presence is only attested because they are named and they become the pure product of the actors’ oral or written belief and performance, beyond the appearances of the environment. From these various works, it can be seen that institutions, such as “socionatures”, are perceived in the environment either through their material manifestations or through pure symbols. There are in fact myths, slogans, convictions, narratives, utopias and identities that have an obvious character and a strong mobilizing power, although their concrete manifestations can take very varied forms. These are motives without their own materiality. These are pure arguments or motivations that can live up to various appearances. These are referred to here as institutional motives. DEFINITION 3.– Institutional motive. An institutional motive is a discursive expression based on heterogeneous communication skills (argumentation, image, narrative) that serves as a reason for action and derives its justification from an institution (law, rule, norm). Such a motive does not refer to a specific shape in the lived environment. 1.5. Emerging environmental policy issues The definition of the environment we propose is not reduced to the way it is thought of politically, but integrates what the actors perceive physically around them, geographically and historically. This emphasis on perceptions

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decompartmentalizes the environmental issue from its ecological meaning (to which we will return later). The environment may also be the food world, the professional world, the media, religion, etc. In all situations, actors sort their perceptions out using meaningful forms of the material context that are socially transmitted through language. This approach to the environment makes it very widespread but not omnipresent. There are also well-bounded situations in which the material context is perfectly defined and there is no need to focus on the environment, because perceptions are unambiguous and merge with the representations that the actors have of it. This is the case with digital device interfaces, which are designed so that icons always refer to the same applications regardless of their relative position, regardless of their environment. Other situations under controlled conditions ensure that the things perceived are identical to actors’ expectations (laboratories, industries, etc.). In these cases, an environmental approach is not justified. On the contrary, in all cases where perceived forms may depend on context, an environmental approach makes it possible to restore the distinction between the perception of a form and its representation and to pay attention to the effects of visibility, scale and focus. Following Virginie Tournay’s theoretical proposal, it is possible to draw a parallel between how individuals perceive environmental motives and how they perceive institutions, based on clues, by reconstructing shapes and assigning them an explanatory principle or motivation. However, when individuals adhere to an institution without questioning it, the precise form of that institution in time and space loses its importance to them in favor of a more permanent consistency. In the remainder of this book, we will focus on the processes by which environmental motives can be articulated with institutional motives, i.e. how material forms observed in time and space are invested by social groups to become legitimate patterns of perceiving and categorizing the environment. These forms evoke emotions because their perception is not just a chain of intentional operations but an incorporated process. And emotions can also motivate collective action. This will lead us to redefine environmental

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policies as collective responses to the perception in the environment of forms whose appearance or disappearance is a problem. In this perspective, we take for granted the material basis for the perception of environmental problems, but we underline how framing processes shape this perception. These problems are therefore both natural and constructed.

2 Politicization and Institutionalization of the Environment

In this chapter, we will explore how actors use existing environmental motives to promote public decisions, as well as how they modify their contours and meaning. We will see that not all environmental motives are generic, ecological and stable. Some may acquire visibility while referring to a singular form (section 2.1). Their ecological character is not given, but results from specific political work. It is therefore possible to green a motive that was not initially perceived as green (section 2.2). Given their spatial nature, environmental motives can also be politicized differently depending on the scale of perception (section 2.3). Policy instruments to which environmental motives are attached influence them and also give them some stability (section 2.4). Based on this panorama, a summary of political work on environmental motives is proposed (section 2.5). 2.1. Environmental motives between singularity and generality For environmental motives (both forms and environmental motivations) to gain legitimate perception and motivation for public action, they must enter politics. Pragmatic sociology identifies two ways of going political. Politicization consists of increasing generality. Crystallization, on the contrary, values singularity. The “rise in generality” (Barthe et al., 2013) is a process in which the universal is valued in the public space, to the detriment of situations that are too singular. The rise of public problems, for example, is understood as a

Politicization of Ecological Issues: From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives, First Edition. Gabrielle Bouleau. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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social investment allowing particular perceptions and understandings of a problem to be grouped into a common definition. Before being voiced in the public space as a well-defined problem, individuals experienced confusion due to discrepancies between the available social categories for describing the world and what they really lived. This gap experienced by a few would then be shared and generalized to achieve a redefinition of the world. The order that they thought was absolute was only particular and called for a revision of qualifications. Such a redefinition is a formal investment (Thévenot 1986) to equip reality and possibly politicize it with reference to the pre-established order. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls this process actualization, rather than generalization. It is “a set of progressive integrations, first local, then global or tending to be global, operating an alignment, a homogenization, a summation of the power relationships” (Deleuze 1986). At the end of this process, a heterogeneous public concerned by realities that were not very similar in perception develops common qualifications and convictions that allow for collective representation of the problem. Jean-Yves Trépos (2004) describes this “rise in generality” as politicization, i.e. as a “means of converting individuals to preferential modes of expression of their passions” (p. 47), by aligning these passions on legitimate values, possibly expressed in norms. This translation of hatred, anger and attachment into fair claims is a struggle for the definition of legitimate meaning and for the “unequal distribution of constraints and benefits, advantages and disadvantages” (p. 54). Through successive tests, knowledge reaches a more abstract level that is likely to be valid for a large number of people. During this process, the context of each experience is gradually eliminated in favor of depersonalized concepts or principles. Abstraction consists of detaching oneself from perceptions. Collective mobilization and public debate bring their share of challenges resulting in more generality, new framing and possible decisions. At the end of this process, motives are instituted by politicization. Often sensations and affects are left aside, considered as not very generalizable. Politicization is a way of putting people into politics by aligning them with legitimate values. However, there is another way to go public and political that does not result from a translation of passions into legitimate claims in line

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with common values. It is a “rise in singularity” (Heinich 2004, Bérard 2015)1 which values the unique event, the exception. Jean-Yves Trépos proposes to name this process crystallization in reference to Stendhal’s conception of love-passion, which makes the loved object an exceptional being in every respect (Trépos 2004, pp. 43–58). Crystallization expands a particular case to highlight its specificity and the emotions it conveys in the public space. This aesthetic commitment is not specific to art but to perception in general, “a way of inscribing the environment within oneself” (Blanc 2008, p. 3) which can be communicated in the public space through “the definition and co-construction of a new space of the sensitive” (p. 5). Nathalie Blanc cites, for example, the political development of a garden at the foot of a building by the women of Tver, a stage town between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, so that “it can be beautiful, as beautiful as anywhere else, just like the botanical garden” (p. 7). Another form of crystallization consists of making a case into a legal precedent. Christelle Gramaglia thus reported on water pollution cases in which the fishermen of the AMPER-TOS association had mobilized, succeeding in making each case not only a legal but also a political landmark. An environmental motive can be instituted as a public problem by making it political and part of the social order. It constitutes an intermediate element between the equipment necessary for achieving more generality (politicization) and enhancement of singularity (crystallization). It is both detached from its context, to capture common ground in various situations, and anchored in a reference celebrated for its exceptionality. It can therefore be put into politics according to these two modalities. For example, “wetlands” is a category of environmental forms that includes marshes, lakes, ponds, lagoons and intermittent branches of rivers. This motive was aligned with biodiversity concerns and was institutionalized globally by the International Ramsar Convention in 1972. There are various national legislations such as the French Water Act of 1992, which elevates wetlands to the status of remarkable ecosystems to be preserved. This motive has been applied in procedures that make it possible to objectify the wetness of an environment based, for example, on soil criteria. The wetland as an instituted motive is evidenced by its administrative inscriptions. The wetland

1 Nathalie Heinich uses this term when discussing art. Yann Bérard proposes borrowing it for qualifying the local concrete expression of global environmental stakes.

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as an environmental pattern is less stable. Just as some social stigmas can be reduced, a drained marsh loses its distinctive soil characteristics. A place can also be instituted by its singularity. This is the case, for example, of Lake Der-Chantecoq in the commune of Saint-Dizier in France. This artificial dam created in 1974 is the largest in Western Europe. It was colonized by common cranes as a resting place during their migration. Its size and the presence of cranes make it an exceptional place for ornithological observation. Although also recognized as a “wetland”, this lake has a more specific status due to its unique reputation. 2.2. Putting motives into politics by greening The environment, precisely because it is not bounded, offers several angles of view, several frames through which to view it and several senses. The institutionalization of legitimate motives is never fully achieved. Emerging nature produces new perceptible discontinuities. Ecological processes can destabilize the listed motives. If environmental motives can nevertheless be stabilized, it is because other mechanisms counterbalance these destabilizing tendencies with strings of reminders to nonenvironmental institutions. As political ecologist Tim Forsyth argues (2003), environmental observation varies according to the viewpoint chosen. Depending on whether a medium is sampled finely or coarsely, the same shapes will not appear and the same causalities will not be inferred. However, the grain, scale, observation time and sampling frequency can be varied to infinity. In scientific practice, these observation choices are more than a point of view. They are protocols set by epistemic communities (Haas 1992). Depending on their discipline, environmental scientists do not perceive the same reality. At any time, an actor can take hold of a characteristic of the environment that has escaped sampling, to requalify it by referring to values and thus politicize it (Lagroye 2003). To these physical realities, several contours can be associated, depending on whether attention is paid to colors, textures, chemistry, biology, etc. In addition, exploration of the causes at the origin of these contours refers to other elements, which leads to the identification of new contours.

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This chapter focuses on the process of interpreting the physical environment by categorizing it into distinct forms. In both environmental and social matters, the evidence of contours depends on the scale of observation and on conventions. Continuity perceived from afar turns into discontinuity as we move closer together. Microscopic observation reveals microbes, viruses and prions that are totally imperceptible to the naked eye. It is also known that the length of the coastline varies with the scale. Such a forest path that is invisible from the sky turns out to be a local barrier for water flow or a trail heavily used by deer. The individual is a useful reference scale to study society, all the more so because civil status and the statistics of States have produced information about each human being. There is no “indivisible” entity that is the environmental counterpart of the individual in the social field. As soon as the issues are no longer just social, the grain of environmental analysis can continuously vary from the infinitely small to the global scale. Any environmental form can in turn be divided into other forms, included in the first one or overflowing it. This perception of the environment is not only a matter of tools, but also depends on delimitation conventions. The same area will or will not be considered as forest and its edge may be positioned differently according to the density of trees chosen to distinguish the forest from the moorland (Robbins 2001). This constructivism of contours can apply as much to social realities as to environmental realities which also have their share of abstraction that we reconstruct from indices. “The ordinary perception of the social world in distinctive collectives is not independent of language and sensory receptors, whether visual, auditory or tactile in nature” (Tournay 2014, p. 83). Nor is the ordinary perception of the environmental world in separate groups, and this categorization leads to different motivations. The same environment can be understood according to different forms. Through categorization, these forms can be associated with motives for action. Any socially recognized form is a resource for collective action because it aligns individual perceptions with a common representation. This representation in turn conveys meanings for action. The pigeon is not only a species of bird, but also a prey for hunters, a plague for the cleaner or an old way of communicating at a distance. There are motivations for the form. The pattern is often taken for a motive.

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What is relevant to the environment, natural processes and ecology in a situation depends on conventions and observation tools. Isolating the active causes in the environment is always a contingent reduction, in a given time and space, with the available knowledge and particular protocols. The attribution of a cause or ecological effect to a form or a motive is never definitively established; it requires an argumentation (statistical correlation, observation of control sites, explanation of the process, etc.) and regular updates to take into account everything that arises unexpectedly in the environment. This is what we will call greening. Other authors define greening as a “normative and cognitive process aimed at an ecological inflection” of society (Ginelli 2017) or as the “contemporary frame of reference for environmental policies” (Mormont 2013). However, this process of disseminating ecological standards requires the establishment of ecological causalities between environmental practices and forms or motives. Our definition is therefore complementary to theirs: the greening of consciences and standards requires the greening of environmental motives, which are the basic elements by which society perceives its environment. DEFINITION 4.– Greening. The greening of an environmental motive is the attribution of an ecological cause or consequence to it. Greening is often based on scientific work. Jared Diamond’s argument (2006) ecologizes the religious practices of Easter Island where he links these rites to their ecological footprint. In the field of environmental history, several historians agree that the Napoleonic decree on dangerous, unhealthy and inconvenient establishments has had significant effects on pollution (Guillerme et al., 2004, Massard-Guilbaud 1999). In so doing, they associate an institution (the 1810 decree) with an effect on the environment, considering that there has been, before and after the 1810 decree, an effect on the environment, which is perceivable through traces left in archives and in contaminated sediments. In political science, when Pierre Muller (1984) explained the generalization of the tractor in French agriculture by an agricultural modernist reference frame, it is not a betrayal of his thinking to say that he attributes fossil energy consumption and its long-term contribution to climate change (ecological effect) to an institutional motive (the modernist reference frame). Similarly, for Laura Michel (2012), the institutionalization of the role of cement manufacturers in the national negotiation of environmental standards (institutional motive) has an impact on dust

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production by these industries and their greenhouse gas emissions (two ecological motives). This allows institutions to be greened by attributing an ecological cause or consequence to them. The naturalistic study of institutions is home to some spatial reasoning in which institutions are explained by spatial forms. This amounts to politicizing these forms by associating them with the normative content of the institutions thus explained. Examples remain rare and the political science literature prefers to explain institutions with social facts (interests, beliefs or history) rather than with ecological reasoning. However, several studies explain institutions by the effects of form and proximity, which can be interpreted as environmental motives. In the sociological tradition of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967), these spatial forms are “enclaves of knowledge that are distinguished according to their presence and consistency” (Rudolf 1998, our emphasis). The frequency of meetings then depends on physical and environmental configurations and the typification process results from the forms perceived as the most frequent. In the academic community, for example, knowledge enclaves are disciplines. On a global scale, their limits do not appear to be spatialized. However, on a university scale, these are specific buildings where we meet colleagues and encounter books that convey particular ways of typifying reality. For Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (1983), these meetings are located in a network of relationships. They are happy to talk about an organizational ecology that governs the diffusion of practices by mimicry. Other authors use the term field to describe compartmentalized spaces in the social world in which actors pursue common objectives with more or less consensus (Fligstein and McAdam 2012) or competition (Bourdieu 1987) on worldviews. Michel Foucault’s work on disciplinary powers can be read as the imputation of a spatial determinism to these forms of power. It establishes a strong link between the production of government knowledge and the construction of specific spatial arrangements, such as the separation of beds in hospitals or prison panopticons (Barthe and Lemieux 1998), to raise the visibility of public action targets. “The exercise of discipline presupposes a device that constrains the gaze, a device where the techniques that make it possible to induce power relations, and where, in return, the means of coercion clearly make visible those to whom they

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apply” (Foucault 1975, p. 201). The spatial materialization of the hospital system creates the conditions of power. On the contrary, when institutions are perceived as totemic, animistic or analogical, as defined by Virginie Tournay, it becomes incongruous to green them by associating them with environmental motives insofar as causal reasoning is not the explanatory principle of these categories of motives. Totemic, animic and analogical institutional patterns have a consistency in time and space, but their form does not matter. According to Virginie Tournay, the ordinary relationship to institutions (totemic, animic or analogical) allows us to perceive institutional patterns in very varied forms, even in the absence of a specific form. This detachment from forms is perhaps a condition of their permanence. At the end of her book, she thus answers Geoffrey Hodgson’s question (2006) on the maintenance of the British monarchy, despite periods totally devoid of any attestation of the institution’s presence (neither protocols nor institutional roles): “The institution is consistent because it exists in our minds, even when these powers are not exercised and these forms of attestation are imperceptible” (Tournay 2014, p. 298). The United Kingdom monarchy is “a totemic ontology whose strength is to connect the subjects to the British crown, regardless of the visibility and manifestations of the royal family” (p. 303). If we follow this reasoning to its conclusion, there is no longer any reason to be emancipatory in the critical analysis of institutions. “With this world view, explaining institutional change is a challenge” (p. 308) because what seems to be changing can always be reduced to an insignificant element in terms of what gives consistency to the institution. The institutions’ animistic, totemic and analogical perceptions are not based on environmental motives and are therefore resistant to greening. We will assume here that the control of these non-naturalist perceptions is never total. The social construction of motives never totally confines individuals. Politicization and naturalistic reasoning can play a destabilizing role. In our ordinary relations with institutions, we sometimes have doubts about their permanence and their lack of interaction with the environment. From this disorder, which pragmatic sociologists call a test, a desire for investigation that can change our perception of the world can arise. These investigations are not reserved for political scientists.

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2.3. Frames of environmental forms: the contributions of political ecology Environmental motives reach the public space when they are problematic. An environmental motive entry into politics is the result of a mobilization that builds a public problem around the motive, or a controversy that arises about the motive, or the institutionalization of that motive by an authority. By entering politics, the motive achieves a status of public recognition in addition to its character of social representation incorporated and activated by perception. Different sensibilities, which do not interpret reality according to the same motives, confront each other in the public space. Bruno Jobert writes that social definitions of reality, in order to gain legitimacy, “must fit into the representations that ensure social integration […], into the reference models that claim to make society intelligible and that are the basis of these legitimization processes. They must also be compatible with the modes of social mediation that characterize a given society” (Jobert 1992). The same applies to legitimate environmental motives. It is thus by mutual referencing and alignment that a pattern is embedded in a normative framework that it reinforces. For example, in the French administrative environment where female staff have long been obliged to wear skirts, pants have become clothes that feminists have politicized in order to include them as legitimate women’s clothing. Conversely, politicization may also aim to disqualify or destabilize forms that are perceived as threats to social integration and the ways in which decisions are organized. Debates on the veil testify to this politicization of a form and motive with ideological considerations associated with it. Political sociology has shown that not all problems are debated in the public arena, and only some reach the decision-making agenda. For society to engage its decision-makers in the subject, the problem must be recognized as new and perceived as a source of inequality, a violation of a moral principle, harmful to a collective or dangerous. There must be a population concerned (Claeys-Mekdade 2001). It must also identify with the same definition of the issue. Indeed, in environmental matters, as in health and risk matters, an important step in policy design is the way in which the problem is presented publicly. Robert Entman (1993) defines this “framing” as a selection of elements of reality that guide the qualification of the problem and its priorities, the moral judgment made on the problem and the recommendations for public action. Authors who have focused on collective mobilizations (Benford and Snow 2000) see these framing operations as

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ways of enrolling members in collectives to gain support and undermine opposing arguments, which are themselves partial and focused on part of reality. From this perspective of political sociology, the frameworks that serve to organize the elements of the problem to facilitate its treatment in a particular direction have no materiality. They are purely cognitive. “Thus, collective action frames are action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization” (Benford and Snow 2000, p. 614). If the authors talk about making a problem visible, this visibility does not refer to visual perception, but to an intellectual conception. However, environmental motives are not only views of the mind, they also summon our five senses. Their framing is not only a rhetoric but also requires a demarcation of time and space. The notion of framing used in political sociology comes from a broader definition proposed by Erving Goffman that is also articulated to material realities. For Goffman, individuals interpret situations according to frames of reference that are not only beliefs and speeches but also ways of categorizing reality based on elements that are partly material (Goffman 1991). Thus, the movie ticket seller who hears “two, please” understands that the fellow interlocutor wants to buy two tickets for the next session because the situation is so framed by the physical and social system of the counter that it would be crazy to imagine that the customer is asking for something else. However, if the cinema entrance is under construction or the person in charge of selling tickets is surrounded by other goods on sale, the situation is immediately less focused and requires a much more explicit interaction: “Is this where you buy the tickets for the cinema screening?” Goffman’s frames are social representations that are associated with space boundaries that are conducive to certain forms of social interaction. The frame is a representation activated by a perception, just as the frame of a painting reduces the field of perception of a landscape and organizes its representation. Environmental motives are also ways of framing reality by focusing on the perception of a particular contour. The spatiality of environmental patterns makes their perception dependent on the scale of observation, the focal length chosen, the grain and the filters used. This dependence results from the specific modalities of politicization. Indeed, by varying focal length, we can modify the pattern in its spatial and temporal dimensions, to reconstitute a coherent articulation between a cognitive framework and a legitimate perception. The framing of environmental motives is both material and cognitive. By playing on the

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observation mode, we can make different contours appear, some of which correspond more to certain visions of the world. These actions of “transgressing the established categories” are a form of politicization (Lagroye 2003, p. 361 and 365). The motives-forms categorize reality by potentially challenging other instituted categories. Political ecology research in anthropology and critical geography has explored the political effects of environmental categorization. Work in this area specifically focuses on the effects of scale in the perception and politicization of environmental issues. For political ecologists, environmental realities are social natures or socionatures (Swyngedouw 1999). The separation of their constructed and natural parts is the result of framing rather than an absolute truth. To call the Amazon an old-growth forest, for example, is to deny all the agroforestry practices implemented by pre-Columbian populations. Political ecology pays particular attention to lexical production and how certain words can convey moral considerations to produce standards and govern environmental practices. By varying points of view, scales and temporalities, these analyses reflect the plurality of perceptible forms and motives according to political knowledge and interpretations. This restitution of plurality makes it possible to question hegemonic motifs. Two examples chosen from this strand of research will provide us with an illustration of the political resources that environmental motives offer to actors in general. Paul Robbins’ study on garden turf in front of houses in the United States (Box 2.1) provides an understanding of the political work done by distinction, equivalence and essentialization. Nancy Peluso’s study on Indonesian rubber (Box 2.2) will show us how environmental motives can be used to affirm the coherence of political territories and to make traces of protest invisible. In his book Lawn People, Paul Robbins (2007) focuses on North American residential areas with front gardens that are grassed, unfenced and visible from the road. This “front lawn” is problematic because it requires a lot of herbicides. However, campaigns to raise residents’ awareness of the environmental impacts of weedkillers do not change their use practices. Based on this observation, the author launches an initial survey at the individual level to understand what the word “lawn” means for each inhabitant. Paradoxically, the greater the lawn owners’ cultural and financial capital, the more aware they were of the ecological impacts of plant

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protection products and the more they applied them to the lawn (directly or by entrusting spreading to an employee). Respondents say that their lawn suffers2. They fear for its integrity because of competition with dandelions, which is a characteristic pattern for poor lawn care. At the neighborhood level, the author notes that pesticide use and lawn mowing are closely related to the fact that neighbors know each other by first name. The front lawn is a social space where gardening tips are exchanged and the reputation of the neighborhood is controlled. Beautiful front lawns indicate to visitors that they are walking around in a wealthy neighborhood. A poorly maintained lawn affects not only the real estate value of the house behind it, but also potentially the value of all the houses in the neighborhood3. Lawns are a marker of community solidarity in rich neighborhoods in a country with high social inequalities. If we look at the United States as a whole, we discover that grass grown in front gardens is a species particularly vulnerable to competition from dandelions, imported from Europe by garden centers that also sell the herbicides necessary for its maintenance. The form and motive for owner satisfaction is a profit motive for an industry that has been able to create dependency in a context of economic segregation. Advertising has succeeded in linking suburban contentment between neighbors and the absence of dandelions. This does not mean that lawns are a permanently instituted ground. Practices of grass resistance exist with the promotion of dry gardens or wild gardens in neighborhood committees that find other markers of solidarity. Box 2.1. The front garden lawn in the United States, studied by Paul Robbins (2007)

By varying the scales of representation of well-kept lawns in front of homes in residential areas in the United States, Paul Robbins makes us perceive several lawn patterns: lawn as a vegetation “pet”, lawns as a neighborhood “shop window” and the American dream lawn. While vegetation “pets” and “shop windows” are motives for affection and pride that

2 The idea that each owner is perfectly aware of the needs of their lawn is also used in the article by Christopher D. Stone (2010). In favor of trees being granted legal status, Stone writes: “Natural objects can communicate their wants (needs) to us, and in ways that are not terribly ambiguous. I am sure I can judge with more certainty and meaningfulness whether and when my lawn wants (needs) water, than the Attorney General can judge whether and when the United States wants (needs) to take an appeal from an adverse judgment by a lower court” (p. 24). The idea that the lawn will communicate its natural needs to its owner denies the interpretative aspect of perceiving this need. 3 Economists would say that there is a spatial dependence on the lawn effect.

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make pesticide use a necessary evil for homeowners, the American dream lawn reveals a commercial strategy to build a dependency on this “evil”. Paul Robbins uses the juxtaposition of these different more or less desirable representations of lawns to politicize their existence and remind us that they are a choice. In the case illustrated by Robbins, the whole process of politicization is played out in a single country. Other cases may involve realities that circulate in larger spaces. Indonesia produces rubber whose price is set abroad in industrialized countries. Nancy Peluso (Box 2.2) shows that the landscape and cultural pattern of the rubber plantation is equated by international development and political ecology actors with certain production conditions that are politicized (disappearance of slash-and-burn rice, maintenance of agroforestry systems, slavery conditions, despoiled Chinese people condemned to exile). This politicization creates different categories of latex that can contribute to a segmentation of these goods into non-substitutable goods on the market and with which different political territories are associated. Nancy Peluso (Peluso 2009, 2012, Peluso and Vandergeest 2001) studied the historical evolution of rubber tree speeches in the Indonesian archipelago (particularly in Borneo and West Kalimantan), paying attention to the supposed links between agriculture and politics and questioning the effects of these discursive associations. In the 1990s, which were marked by debates on the self-sufficiency of developing countries, rubber trees in Borneo were assimilated to a cash crop competing with slash-and-burn rice lands (Dove 1996). During episodes of overproduction, prices fell, but rubber trees are trees that are planted for several years. Small farmers4 in Borneo were anxious to see rubber, a pattern that was permanently inscribed in the landscape, “eating their rice”. The same dilemma between rice and rubberwood arose in Kalimantan, but small local producers had domesticated a more rustic rubberwood, Hevea brasiliensis, which was conducive to maintaining rice in agroforestry systems. They called this latex, less competitive with food crops, their “daily rice”. Environmental activists and agricultural extension workers then did political work to distinguish in the field and in markets between these two categories of rubber trees, the “rice eater” and the “daily rubberrice” or “jungle rubber” by associating this tree with the idealized pattern of the jungle. The enthusiasm for jungle rubber was reflected in Indonesian rubber in general. The tree promoted in industrial plantations by the British and Dutch 4 Those operating over small areas.

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colonial governments became the tree of choice for small producers. In a new political narrative, community and environmental justice triumphed over capitalism. On the international market, this story has given Indonesian rubber a value different from that produced in the Congo or the Peruvian Amazon under slave-like conditions. However, this Indonesian success story ignores the origin of rubber trees in the archipelago. Hevea was introduced during Dutch colonization by small Chinese farmers. At the beginning of the 20th Century, this Chinese origin was known and recognized. The pattern of the Kalimantan rubber plantations was synonymous with plots cultivated by the Chinese. Later, the racialized nationalism of the totalitarian regime deprived the descendants of China of civil and land rights and their abandoned lands were appropriated with rubber plantation subsidies. The political erasure (Peluso 2009) of Chinese origin traces facilitated the emergence of another story in which rubber came to embody Indonesian identity. Box 2.2. Indonesian rubber studied by Nancy Peluso (2012)

Like any descriptive category, an environmental motive produces equivalence and distinction. The general rubber pattern makes “jungle rubber” equivalent to “rice eating” latex. The “front gardens” include dry gardens and lawns vulnerable to dandelions in an undifferentiated way. These equivalence and distinction operations are performed on the contour of the pattern. The environmental motive is a class of equivalence for the elements it contains. At its border, it proceeds by distinction. Celebrating the virtues of “dry gardens” is like disqualifying irrigated grass. The environmental motive creates isotropy internally and a separation from the outside. The material characteristics of its pattern serve as a basis for categorization. If dandelions were not so visible, their advertising disqualification would have required more than images. The effects of equivalence and distinction of the environmental motive are resources for politicization. Drawing attention to a distinction is a first step towards claiming different treatment. This does not mean that the use of a new category de facto creates a special regime, but in the absence of a particular word to name realities perceived as different, their specificity cannot be qualified in the public space. Symmetrically, the equivalence of realities that make up the same environmental motive justifies their counting

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with the same unit (commensuration), which can be used as a political measure of the weight of this category. In France, the visibility of accidental pollution in rivers is the result of the mobilization of a small group of State hydrobiologists who have played on the distinction between a referenced invertebrate fauna, established as an institutional environmental motive, and that observed after periods of untimely discharges (Bouleau 2016). By making this distinction public, they have succeeded in making pollution, that was not previously considered problematic because it was not differentiated from authorized discharges visible in the public space. In other examples, political agenda setting occurs through equivalence. Thus, in order to set an ambition for restoring river water quality in 2008, the French government communicated on the “percentage of bodies of water in good condition”, which made the different bodies of water equivalent and made it possible to compensate for the poor state of one body of water by the good state of another (Bouleau 2017a). This equivalence made it possible to negotiate a target of 66% of surface water bodies that should reach good ecological status by 2015. However, this “hyperindicator” (Carré et al., 2017) only makes sense for actors who act on several water bodies. This percentage means little to people living along a particular watercourse who complain about its poor condition. Environmental motives are not pure abstractions independent of reality, but the realities they describe could be grouped and interpreted differently. We never see all the rubber plantations or all the front gardens at the same time in a direct way. The actors perceive reality in a partial, discontinuous way. They reconstruct the categories that they are accustomed to from the affordances of reality. Other individuals could have assembled these clues differently and identified another reality. Motives are not immutable structures that are imposed on actors, they are shaped by usage. Through the interplay of situations, individuals are taken in turn inside or outside a category and may feel, immediately or in anticipation, its discriminating or homogenizing effect. When the biotic index was developed in France, not all riparian property owners were in favor of hydrobiologists taking samples from the riverbed bordering their properties. Those whose activity was likely to generate accidental pollution suspected that the comparison exercise performed by experts would generate a tool for making visible a practice that they preferred to keep invisible, so that they could remain in the convenient category of various unnamed polluters.

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The rise and fall of public problems (Trom and Zimmerman 2001) involves producing categories and negotiating their contours. In the environment, these categories are patterns that refer to a perceived form. As we will see in Chapter 3, the production of a specific environmental motive for accidental pollution in watercourses (fish floating upside down) has made it possible to name this problem and make it visible in public spaces. From the beginning, this motive was charged with moral (the equivalent of theft) and political (which ruined the efforts of fishermen) significance. However, politicization can also occur in a second step by assigning a moral dimension to a form that was simply descriptive (rubber that becomes “daily rice”). The social mobilization required for the intellectual construction of an individual problem into a collective problem (Cefaï and Trom 2001) feeds on the distinction and equivalence allowed by categorization, as well as on the essentialization of this problem, as if its nature were homogeneous and all its manifestations had the same properties. When a motive is first coined, it can be used discursively as the subject of a verb to suggest responsibilities (“lawn is polluting…”) and elicit a reaction from public authorities (Felstiner et al., 1980). The essentialization of a motive allows the imputation of general laws that apply to the entire category. It erases the possible intentionality of the individuals who make up the category or contribute to it. More specifically, it masks the fact that these individuals may choose not to behave in a uniform manner. “Indonesian latex is favorable to rubber from small producers” or “front gardens consume herbicides” are statements that affirm the homogeneity of their subjects against the possibility of an exception. As actors include or exclude elements in an environmental motive, they change its boundaries. In a changing world, what seems stable is actually the result of assimilation or demarcation from the new. “Jungle rubber” does not automatically become Indonesian latex, but because of the traces of its Chinese origins that have been erased and because the problematic nature of competition between rice land and rubber plantation has been blurred by the promotion of agroforestry systems. The contours of environmental motives are uncertain because their ecological, commercial or political context is changing. The “rubber” category can be stabilized, but the rubber environment can always be requalified. Two factors are particularly conducive to the re-politicization

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of environmental motives: their spatiality, which makes them territorial issues and unevenly distributed resources, and their reference to a materiality that evolves under the influence of the market, public policies and biophysical processes. The spatiality of patterns affects their visibility, the perception of their abundance and the territory associated with their presence. When their spatial distribution changes, the territorial interests or meanings associated with them change. This change may lead to politicization. Japanese knotweed has seduced gardeners who have acclimatized it to color the surroundings of artificial water bodies, but its escape from gardens has made it a public problem. Once beyond the boundaries of mastery, the pattern became invasive. A rare pattern promoted for its specificity loses its interest if it proliferates. In the 1820s in Paris, there was a rush towards “brown gold”, aimed at collecting nitrogenous materials of organic origin (cesspools, horse manure, etc.) in order to enhance their economic value for market gardeners on the periphery. After 1930, this brown gold pattern was completely devalued by the possibility of chemically producing fertilizers using coal energy. Urban feces have become a problematic form that has been solved by their discharge into the Seine (Barles and Lestel 2007)5. Conversely, a common form (the bread oven, the mill, the ford) can be revalued as ancient heritage if it disappears. When a pattern proliferates beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries, the factors associated with it create uncertainty and even disbelief. In northwestern North America, the spotted owl surprised ecologists assessing its extinction risk. They had documented its habitat as being subservient to old-growth forests. They had therefore recommended aligning the protection of spotted owls with more sustainable forest management. Ecologists have therefore not taken the signs of its presence in the edge areas seriously. However, further research has shown that this species is looking for both very old trees and more recent afforestation areas (Gosselin and Bouleau 2016). The changing spatiality of “socionatural” realities offers opportunities to repoliticize their motives. Environmental patterns refer to materialities that can also change as a result of trade and public policies. British grass seeds were imported into the United States, acclimatized in these new regions and then punctuated residential areas with green patterns that did not exist there. Government

5 We will come back to the motives that justified this solution in Chapter 3.

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loans to small Indonesian producers to plant Hevea brasiliensis on land from which Chinese descendants have been expropriated are generating a new Indonesian agroforestry pattern. When in 1964, the French government set up the Basin Financial Agencies to subsidize pollution abatement, a new form and motive co-financed by these Agencies flourished: activated sludge wastewater treatment plants, a standard solution for eliminating urban effluents (Bouleau et al., 2017). Thus new wooded, grassed or concrete landscapes were established instead of other patterns and motives. They potentially challenged the homogeneity of a territory and the isotropy of a governed space. State, scientific and market practices that stabilize environmental motives through paper-based registration procedures (Latour 1993) also have material impacts on space. By promoting or prohibiting certain practices, public action thus transforms territories by revealing new environmental realities that actors can constitute as new patterns and motives. The example of Indonesian rubber shows that public policies can help to erase some motives or replace them with others. While environmental activists and agricultural extension workers have made “jungle rubber” visible by distinguishing it from other forms of rubber available on the market, policies of despoiling Chinese rights have made them invisible. In this case, the traces that have been erased make it more difficult to mobilize political support for the Chinese. In other cases, public policy can help to remove an environmental motive and thus remove a benchmark for public action. Vincent Marquet (2014) stated that water management planning bodies experience difficulties in taking climate change into account because its manifestations are not visible. Actors can act politically by making an environmental motive visible. Public policies can prevent the greening or politicization of a motive by removing it. Finally, the “socionatural” realities to which environmental motives refer to do interact with their environment in a chemical, biological, ecological and social manner. If moved, they will interact with new environments in a way that cannot be deduced from past observations. Cargo ships that transport cars also carry rats, insects and marine species (in the water used as ballast). All these ecological beings are likely to leave the ship and move into new environments, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes it (2018). We are regularly confronted with new “socionatures” that transform environments.

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Their observation and representation will depend on the mobilization of actors, data acquisition protocols and their aggregation into new patterns and motives. The greening of motives consists of causally linking them to a material reality that is often poorly known and unsettled. These evolving causal relationships make environmental motives relatively unstable. 2.4. Stabilization of patterns by co-production These evolutions give rise to discrepancies between known and perceived patterns. The interaction of motives with their environment questions what society has established in the long term (property boundaries, public policy zoning, blackout periods). Science alone cannot solve these controversies. Scientific knowledge can be mobilized to stabilize an environmental motive as well as to destabilize it. For Sheila Jasanoff, the legitimacy of scientific knowledge in a society is based on the co-production of legitimate knowledge and social order (Jasanoff 2004). Representations of the natural world would gain legitimacy in the social world by bringing scientific and political coherence between “what is” and “what must be”, thanks to a permanent readjustment that is rarely made visible and that can maintain the naturalist sophism. She concludes that climate change is all the more problematic as it operates a divorce between global facts and what has value at the local level. It projects “a new totalizing image of the world as it is, without regard for the historical investments made by societies” (Jasanoff 2010). We can think, for example, of the material and symbolic investments made for the fossil fuel car, which resulted in the abandonment of industrial alternatives (electric cars existed before 19006). Following the mass production of the private car, urbanization was adapted accordingly (housing estates, motorways, car parks), consumption patterns changed (supermarkets, tourism), dedicated professions developed (driving schools, road safety, petrol stations) and specialized magazines and radio or television programs accompanied this development. All these investments are materially reflected in our environment. We are constantly in the presence of signs (horns, signals, roads, etc.) that attest to the importance of the

6 We think, for example, of the Jamais Contente (Never Satisfied), the first electric car to reach 100 km/h in 1899.

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automobile motive and make it difficult to explore a future world without a car. For an environmental motive to be institutionalized, it must take place in a social order maintained by a legitimate power. This process is carried out by mutual referencing, a new category that reinforces certain values that reinforce the categorization process, as well as by linking them to sources of procedural legitimacy conferred by law and science. These two modern institutions (law and science) based on legal and rational procedures (Weber 1922) apprehend reality from laws, which are intended to be general regardless of history or geography. To become institutionalized, environmental patterns and motives must take place in this law and in this scientific knowledge to which, in turn, facilitates the exercise of power, the application of the law and the production of knowledge. National statistics, inventories and classifications (Bowker and Star 1999) are important vectors for stabilizing patterns and motives. They contribute to making reality more predictable, governable or exchangeable. An example is the case of Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893) in the United States, where it was discussed whether or not tomatoes were fruit that were exempt from the customs duty that is exclusive vegetables. English-language dictionaries, botanists and trade specialists were invited to the bar, and then the Court ruled that, in matters of trade, the common sense that makes the tomato a taxable vegetable should be retained. Through a rational and legal procedure, the tomato motive became a governable category again. In the course of their actions and depending on the situation, actors more or less mobilize public policies, science and law to arbitrate, legitimize and stabilize the rational criteria of a motive when it becomes an issue. For an environmental motive to become stabilized in the modern world, it is necessary for actors with rational-legal authority to include it in procedures or instruments of public action. It then becomes more costly for actors who are uncomfortable with this category to question it because it requires changing policies, rules of law and knowledge based on this category. Celia Lowe recounted how the identification of a new form of macaque in the Togian Islands archipelago in Indonesia has been the subject of political work to ensure that this form is recognized as an endemic species and becomes an emblematic motive of Indonesia (Lowe 2004). Not only has

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the monkey motive gained legitimacy, but also the biodiversity conservation policy has taken on a new consistency in Indonesia. As mentioned above, a motive can be used both to promote distinction at its borders and to justify equivalence within it. Charis Thompson explains how African nations have argued that the African elephant is a single species, to justify equating all African elephants within the International Treaty on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in order to allow compensation for pachyderm removals due to hunting in certain regions by increasing the population in protected sites (Thompson 2004). Although environmental motives are easily destabilized because of their link with a constantly changing material context, their institutionalization through their political implementation and their articulation with procedures endowed with rational-legal legitimacy tend to stabilize them. 2.5. A framework for analyzing the politics of environmental motives A global and abstract approach to the environment offers little opportunity for actors to perceive ecological changes or to initiate a change in public action. We assume that changes in environmental and institutional motives are more mobilizing. We recommend focusing the analysis on identifying the public emergence of these motives and what these motives do to public policy. Our research amounts to identifying political work (Jullien and Smith 2011) that mobilizes environmental motives as tools for mediation. Let’s take territories as examples of environmental motives. Political reflections carried out on the territory can be read as analyses of the political work carried out around a totemic motive. In the collective works published on this subject in France in the 2000s (Pasquier et al., 2007, Faure and Douillet 2005, Faure and Négrier 2007, Faure et al., 2007), the territory escapes a definition of naturalist ontology, which may give the impression that it is not defined (Smith 2008). The territory is understood as a subnational level that actors mobilize in their rhetoric of legitimacy, either in competition with other sources of sectoral or territorial legitimacy at other scales, or to summarize these different sources of legitimacy. Territorialization covers very contradictory dynamics, some of which emanate from the central government, others from local authorities, or from

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associations or interest groups. Analysts note that the territory invoked by the actors has a malleable, contingent consistency (Négrier 2005), etc. However, this reference to a territory seems to have a legitimizing virtue that elected officials cannot do without and that they update in rites, symbols and ceremonies. These characteristics reflect the relationship to the territory that Virginie Tournay describes as totemic. While noting that some actors believe in the “potential power of the ‘condensation symbol’ that is territory” (Carter and Smith 2008), the political scientist can initiate a more critical approach (of naturalistic ontology) that builds their own object of analysis. Anne-Cécile Douillet defines the territory as an alternative to sector-based public action of the State. Territorialization then marks the decline of the influence of the central state in favor of the power of local elected officials and the overflow of sectoral logics in the fabric of public policies (Carter and Smith 2008). Caitríona Carter and Andy Smith (2008) characterize the territory as a space institutionalized by rules relating to its borders, its institutional competences, and its procedures for decision-making and political competition. These rules are themselves the result of a struggle between actors regulated by public policies who “confront the[ir] representations of ‘real’ and the ‘desired reality’” to define the general interest. Actors mobilize the territory to negotiate the outlines of the implementation of public action (divisions, thresholds, zoning, tracings, etc.), to defend the eligibility of certain representatives, and to politicize or depoliticize the contradictions of public action. In such political uses of the territory, we recognize an environmental motive that is both form and motivation. Our aim is to identify public manifestations of environmental motives, beyond the specific case of the territory, and based on our canonical definition of environmental motives. We seek to identify their public manifestations and how actors participate in their actualization in the design and implementation of public policies. To study these changes systematically, it is necessary to identify how these environmental motives are politicized or crystallized and stabilized and how institutional motives can be questioned about their materiality and ecology. Table 2.1 summarizes this analysis grid.

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We propose a new conceptualization of environmental institutions based on their perceptions. The sociology of perceptions invites us to do so with the notion of affordance, which explains how what is perceived in a situation can become a support for action. “Socionatures” offer opportunities for individuals and societies through their motives, which are both recognizable forms and causes of mobilization. The stability of these environmental motives can be addressed with the concept of the co-production of knowledge and social order. Their destabilization by politicization or repoliticization has been well-documented by empirical studies of political ecology. Authors generally account for categories of perception and representation (motives) that are conducive to political games of distinction, equivalence and essentialization. This approach is not limited to environmental motives, and all institutions can be understood according to actors’ sensory perceptions, as Virginie Tournay proposes, by revealing the characteristics associated with institutions that give them permanence in time and space. However, the least questioned institutions rely on motives that do not refer to specific contours. The difference between an environmental motive and an institutional motive is not established once and for all. The form that serves as a sign of an institutional motive can be taken at any time in a controversy about its proximity effects (thinking about the motive in its environment) or its biophysical effects (greening the motive). Such a situation forces actors to rework the institutional aspect and the material reference of the motive politically. The dialogue between naturalistic perceptions and other forms of perception of institutional and environmental motives is the condition for their sensory and critical understanding, to avoid both the “violence of objectification” and “absorption by influence” (Lemieux 1995). To this end, we propose to articulate the analytical framework proposed by Virginie Tournay and the analysis of public policies to account for changes and permanencies in environmental policies based on (1) the consistency (see Table 1.1) of the environmental motives involved and (2) the political work of the actors who crystallize them, make them (in)visible, politicize them, stabilize them or green them (Table 2.1).

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Political work on a motive

Definition and modus operandi

Examples

Crystallization of an environmental motive

To make an aesthetic emotion linked to this motive public, by increasing singularity

Expressing the joy associated with this “jizz” (from Ellis 2011) Perceiving a suffering lawn (Robbins 2007)

Visibility of an environmental motive

To recognize the specific nature of this motive by distinction and learning. Acting so that its traces are perceptible

Locating dry gardens without grass (Robbins 2007) Showing the origin of accidental pollution using the biotic index (Bouleau 2016)

Politicization of an environmental motive

To associate the motive with values or interests through equivalence and the rise in generality

“Jungle rubber does not compete with the food autonomy of small producers” (according to Peluso 2012)

Stabilization of an environmental motive

To associate this motive with a public policy or instrument through co-production To require the motive to be included in a procedure by authorized actors (scientists, elected officials, representatives, etc.)

Having an African elephant recognized in the CITES treaty (Thompson 2004) Having the Indonesian macaque recognized as an endemic species (Lowe 2004)

Greening of an environmental motive and institutional motive

To impute an ecological cause or effect to this motive. It is made possible by the essentialization of the motive and the actors’ natural critical competence. Greening an institution is like making it an environmental motive

“The front lawn pollutes” (according to Robbins 2007) “The modernist reference framework has encouraged fossil energy consumption in agriculture” (according to Muller 1984)

Invisibility of an environmental motive

Promoting public policies that erase the traces of these motives, by equivalence to another motive or by ecological effect

Erasing the Chinese origins of rubber in Indonesia (Peluso 2012) Measuring the olfactory manifestations of slaughterhouses and an incinerator with the same indicator (Melard 2013)

Table 2.1. Policy analysis grid for environmental and institutional motives

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The next two chapters deploy this analytical framework on two environmental policy cases: river quality control in Europe since the Ancien Régime and the financing of water management in two basins since the 1970s. In the first case, we will study what fish-related motives have been perceived and then instituted to control water quality in the field and their links with the normative content of the policy instruments through which they have been stabilized. The second case focuses on the political use of motives specific to each river basin to justify significant differences in the implementation of water policy financing.

3 Stabilized Motives of Freshwater Quality Control in Europe

This chapter focuses on perceptions of the environment that have stirred decision-makers into action in Europe in the past. We have access to these environmental motives through archives. We can see their presence in the form of words in official documents (regulations, doctrine of public action, written speeches). Even though the choice of these motives has been the subject of definitional struggles and hesitations, we now only see the stabilized traces. Using a freshwater quality policy as an example, we explore what the evolution of these legitimate ways of seeing rivers reveals. Did the environmental motives instituted in this policy constitute resources for actors who wanted to act to improve river water quality? Have public river management policies encouraged pollution or have they acted to restore ecological functioning? We note that these stabilized motives have made it possible to establish benchmarks for actors and appear to us today as markers of a more or less ecological orientation depending on the public policy instruments with which they have been associated. We apply the motive-based approach to the policy of freshwater quality control and reveal changes over time that are hard to grasp by following the actors because of their multiplicity in environmental issues. As we explained in the first chapter, instrument-based approaches did not note these changes either (section 1.1). The environmental motives and associated policy instruments used to regulate freshwater policy over time provide us with information on past water politics and which physical, spatial, temporal and symbolic environment it produced (section 3.1). We make a diachronic

Politicization of Ecological Issues: From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives, First Edition. Gabrielle Bouleau. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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comparison of how these motives were politically debated through the different modalities we have considered (crystallization, politicization, greening and (in)visibility). We explain how political decisions transformed actors’ perceptions and interpretations (section 3.2). 3.1. The environmental motives of freshwater control policy We take note of the inertia reported in the literature by conducting our analysis over a long period of time in order to have the best chance of observing changes in the motives that have been instituted. We report this evolution and how new environmental motives influenced the policy instruments they were linked to. This research benefited from prior interdisciplinary work carried out as part of a project on the evolution of perceptions of water in France since the 19th Century1. We chose water policy precisely because many historical analyses are available, notably on water quality control instruments. These are legislative and regulatory instruments defining water quality standards and informative instruments that build national representation of water quality. We assume that the choice of established environmental motives speaks for the public interest in water quality and the social demand for regulatory monitoring. The combinations of motives and policy instruments influence legitimate representations and act as a filter for choosing which water pollution cases are brought before the courts (Felstiner et al., 1980)2. Authorizations and prohibitions of polluting practices can be differentiated according to zoning, regulatory monitoring that reduces the burden of proof for plaintiffs to a greater or lesser extent and monetary compensation that prevents litigation. Our perspective on contractual and voluntary instruments is too short to be conclusive. We will discuss them in Chapter 4.

1 ANR Soc&Env Makara (2013–2016) Évolution de la perception de l’eau au cours des XIXe et XXe siècles, led by Laurence Lestel. 2 For a complaint to be filed with the court, the plaintiff must perceive a cause of trouble (naming), for which someone can be charged (blaming) in order to get compensation (claiming). Pollution cases are not only disputes, but also offences. Yet state officers have their own social representations of water-related offences.

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Our work consisted of qualifying how state officers have perceived freshwater quality over time. This focus on the established environmental motives makes it possible to restrict the scope of investigation to motives recognized in law and those identified by several historians, according to the method indicated in Box 3.1. We focus on environmental motives that have raised definition struggles but were stabilized at least for a given period of time. We call them “cold” motives, i.e. reference elements that influenced the way rivers were viewed and the appropriate public action was taken. Previous work showed the importance of the activism of fishermen in favor of water quality in France (Bouleau 2013). We therefore focus our analysis on two types of significant motives for river quality: fishless rivers and fish-related motives. Self-purification and eutrophication have had little impact on French regulation until recently, but have been significant environmental motives in other European countries. We systematically identified these motives from the legal synthesis of water quality regulations carried out by Aude Farinetti (2014) and in the work of environmental historians. We selected the secondary sources whose research questions addressed not only representations of water quality and pollution but also material traces that constituted catches for the actors. The environmental motives we identified were then the subject of requests on all French regulations to determine their coming into force and all the texts that mention them. Controversies reported by historians in relation to new regulation highlight some of the political work that has led to the stabilization of these motives. For documenting instruments after 1960, we conducted 14 interviews between 2004 and 2016 with persons directly involved in the drafting and negotiation of these instruments. Box 3.1. Investigating “cold” motives

The most influential policy instruments on freshwater quality control in France since the 19th Century have been prohibitions, authorizations, zoning, monitoring and monetary compensation instruments. Prohibitions define environmental crimes and offenses. Their implementation is the responsibility of the police services exerting the monopoly of legitimate violence. Prohibitions aim to protect specific socionatures that are captured by environmental motives, i.e. an environmental reality with social values.

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Authorizations are administrative decisions that restrict the scope of prohibitions. They guarantee the right to perform activities that have an impact on the environment, provided that they comply with specific standards, often a limit value. In this case, the permit confers a right to pollute below the limit value. Beyond that, the activity is reprehensible. The limit value is negotiated between public authorities and industrialists, but potential victims are also quick to mobilize. In case of conflict or controversy, the perception of damage is decisive and environmental motives can act as masks or revealing factors. Zoning consists of delineating a geographical area within which environmental standards are different. When they are more severe than before, they call into question the rights to pollute previously granted. If they are more tolerant, they erode the right to a quality environment enjoyed by river users and local residents. Regulatory zoning can be watercourse classifications (when zoning concerns only specific watercourses) or obstacle inventories (when it concerns specific structures). The natural forms of environmental motives often serve as justification for zoning, whereas their social construction remains hidden. However, such decisions are likely to be challenged by actors who find them unfair. Institutionalized monitoring practices aim to produce legitimate information on the state of the environment (Le Bourhis 2015). We know that court convictions are decisions that follow a whole chain of perceptions and actions in civil society (Felstiner et al., 1980). Providing credible elements to make the case visible and the complaint admissible is crucial. However, the lack of legitimate publicly accessible information forces complainants to bear the burden of proof. When information exists, its format also frames the expectations and strategies of stakeholders. Finally, all the economic or contractual instruments that make payment for environmental exploitation or degradation legitimate can be grouped under the term monetarization. These instruments can be monetary compensation for damage, tendering contracts and fees that reflect environmental realities in financial terms. These practices do not necessarily lead to the commodification of environmental realities because they do not necessarily make environmental realities commensurable with any other commodity. The budget involved can be earmarked for ecological restoration.

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These different instruments were used to govern environmental realities, which were perceived and politicized as motives to be protected, harmful motives, motives for intervention and motives that indicated a more or less desired process. Depending on the skills required to perceive these motives, public action was more or less open to the contribution of non-experts. Each motive thus sheds light on the intention, scope, feasibility of implementation and distributional effects of the instrument in its context. However, a motive is unstable. It evolves spatially, temporally, ecologically and politically. The illumination of environmental history is necessary to characterize each motive and its social significance at each period. When available, international comparison highlights motives chosen in one context and ignored in another. 3.1.1. Self-purification and the sacrificed river, motives for authorizing polluting discharges In the 19th Century, two motives justified the discharge of urban and industrial wastewater into rivers. The first is the one of the sacrificed river. The second motive is that of self-purification, which represents the capacity of a river to degrade organic pollution. The first motive conveys the idea that pollution is an inevitable but necessary evil. The second suggests that this pollution may be limited in space. These two motives have been instituted in different contexts but in conjunction with the same instrument of public action: the authorization of wastewater discharge. Under the Ancien Régime in France, the local police force responsible for maintaining public order was also in charge of controlling nuisances caused by economic activities (Reynard 2002). When residents complained about air pollution, water pollution or agricultural losses, the police gave more credence to community representatives than to the interests of the companies. Several incriminated businesses were closed without compensation in the name of preserving “the environment (air, water, places)” (Fressoz 2007) and to not inconvenience the residents. This conservative regulatory approach offered little guarantee to investors, nor did it always protect local residents, since it noted damage after the event and could not prevent industrial disasters such as explosions or soil sterilization.

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The Napoleonic decree of 1810 put an end to this mode of regulation. This instrument benefited from a politicization of industrialization as the path to progress and pollution as a necessary evil. It established a government of experts who were responsible for determining risks before the event and setting preventive rules, including the displacing of inconvenient, dangerous and unhealthy establishments far from cities (Massard-Guilbaud 1999). If they met these standards, the establishments had a guaranteed right to exist. This new method of regulation decriminalized pollution (Guillerme et al., 2004) below the authorized limit value. The principle of authorization was based on a cost–benefit analysis to define the normal level of pollution that society could tolerate and what constituted a crime beyond that. In the event of unintentional accidents, the owner of the industrial establishment was not liable. Local residents who suffered from nuisances were entitled to financial compensation, but their complaints did not threaten the existence of an authorized establishment. As far as soil and air are concerned, this policy has favored the development of industrial suburbs. The value given by experts to existing interests in cities exceeded that of peripheral lands. While under the Ancien Régime the rule favored the status quo in terms of land use, the economic evaluation was very unfavorable to rural areas close to urban areas (Reynard 2002). In terms of water pollution, few stakeholders opposed the discharge of wastewater into urban rivers, provided that the supply of drinking water was not threatened. The sources used for this purpose were monitored by dedicated public services (Carbonaro-Lestel and Meybeck 2009), but rivers were not systematically monitored. Industrialists and urban elites agreed to dedicate certain rivers downstream of cities to the disposal of their waste. In doing so, the authorities instituted an environmental motive that already existed in the Ruhr: the sacrificed river (Garcier 2007). The environmental nature of this motive was due to the fact that a sacrificed river was recognized as having harmful effects on living beings (material form), but this evil was considered necessary (justification) by regulatory authorities in view of industrialization and urbanization policies that generated waste for disposal. This can be seen as a reciprocal obligation agreement characteristic of an animic relationship with institutions: urban residents living near polluted rivers were guaranteed access to city fountains and then to tap water supplies in exchange. We can also see in the perception of the institution of sacrificed rivers an analogic relationship where the deployment

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of industrialization and its attendant innovations were part of a prospective account of progress3. Doctor Gérardin, inspector of the classified establishments of the Seine department, reported in 1869 an incident typical of the dangers of these sacrificed rivers. As the reader can note, Gérardin did not make a case for collective action. He recounted the facts in the register of fatality: “an accident (…) happened to a worker of Stains; he fell into the Rouillon, was able to get out of the water, and went to dry himself in a house, where he recounted his misadventure. A few hours later, he succumbed, despite the swift care he had received” (Gérardin 1874, p. 11). The mining department has made sacrificed rivers increasingly visible by favoring the authorization of discharges into “already” polluted rivers. With the development of home water supplies, rivers were also used to discharge wastewater that was previously specifically collected and evaluated. Between the end of the 19th and 20th Centuries, all major European cities experienced an increase in the quantity of wastewater produced. By linking discharge authorizations to sacrificed rivers, government services allowed domestic and industrial waste flows to merge into rivers and, in doing so, made the responsibilities of the various contributions invisible. The “sacrificed river” motive was not transcribed into the law. It has been used as a justification for public action in administrative reports without being publicized. This motive inscribed pollution in the order of things (Garcier 2009). It erased any memories of positive sensory characteristics associated with the river. The past of a natural river was made invisible by its unique use as a waste outlet. The future of the sacrificed rivers was sealed. Why should we be interested in this motive today? Precisely because it disappeared from the state officer’s repertoire of justification. This deletion evidences that a political change occurred which an instrumental approach does not allow us to see. When water basin financial agencies were set up in France, their promoters at the General Planning Commission and the government intended to define quality objectives for all watercourses.

3 Despite the disasters that John Baptist Fressoz described as a form of “joyful Apocalypse” (Fressoz 2012).

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There would have been rivers that deserved public investment in pollution control and others that had to be sacrificed, as this law reporter explains: “The Canche is a clean river, the Deûle will never be, let’s accept it. The Deûle is horrible, it is full of bubbles because of methane emissions”4. That is not what happened. Anglers represented more than three million people fishing in the public river domain at that time and were well represented in the Senate. They voiced their opposition to this sacrifice (Bouleau 2009, Bouleau 2013). While the motive for the sacrificed river placed rivers in a permanent state of pollution, the absence of this motive in the 1964 Water Act opened up a different future for the rivers concerned. Today, there are no more methane bubbles in the Deûle. In England and Germany, another environmental motive justified wastewater discharge into rivers. The phenomena associated with pollution mainly appeared to scientists as observation instruments were developed. In Paris, Gérardin developed a method for quantifying dissolved oxygen in water in 1872, which brought together ordinary perceptions and expert measurements: dissolved oxygen in water became a sign of its good sanitary quality. In London, scientists proved the correlation between pollution and organic matter and developed a standardized protocol approved by the Royal Commission on River Pollution (Pont and Haidvogl 2016). The work of the botanist Kolkwitz and the microbiologist Marsson (1902) also associated pollution with discharge indicator species (saprobic species). All this scientific work was organized around a particular environmental motive of curiosity and scientific interest: self-purification. New methods of measuring dissolved oxygen revealed a pollution pattern in the vicinity of urban wastewater discharges. A sewer discharge into a river would cause the oxygen content to drop, and then, as it moved downstream, oxygenation would rise again, more or less rapidly, depending on the dilution rate and the amount of pollution discharged. This drop and “back-to-normal” pattern was quickly coined self-purification by urban planners. The spatial extent of this chemical pattern appeared to correspond to that of the ecological impact of the release (pollution-induced modification of aquatic species). All urban rivers would show this motif. However, for focusing on the interactions 4 2006 interview with Ivan Chéret, reporter on the French 1964 Water Act.

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between organic pollution and dissolved oxygen, this mode of observation and its name also made the residues of this interaction invisible5. The wording “self-purification” reinforced the mythical and ritual image of a benevolent and robust nature capable of purifying man through water in a relationship that can be described as totemic. This motive justified not prohibiting discharge, but adjusting authorization thresholds to regulate the length of the pattern so as not to disrupt downstream uses. The spontaneous return of dissolved oxygen into water downstream of a discharge was first demonstrated by Dr Letheby, a professor at London Hospital, in 1867. Governing this process became a motive for public action for cities to consider downstream uses. However, as Catherine Carré and Laurence Lestel point out (2017) in their comparison of urban water management in Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Milan, this concern depended on the political relations between cities and downstream territories. The working class city of Berlin, whose elected representatives did not have the power to impose their wastewater discharges on the rich municipalities downstream, Charlottenburg, Spandau and Potsdam, had to develop treatment systems very early on (Winklhöfer 2017). In Germany and Austria, self-purification was monitored with dedicated indicators to support administrative decisions concerning the authorization levels of releases. In France, on the other hand, this motive with its procession of chemical and biological scientific evidence aroused little interest. Apart from Dr. Gérardin (1874), who was interested in this question, and scientists at the Montsouris laboratory, the French authorities distinguished themselves from their counterparts in neighboring countries by a relative lack of interest in the biochemical motives generated by polluting discharges. In Paris in 1852, an imperial decree authorized the connection and evacuation of domestic and rain waste water into the Seine (Carré 2011) without consideration for the municipalities located downstream. Until 1959, river pollution was not a problem for French health authorities. They required municipalities to build water supply infrastructure from safe sources, outside sacrificed rivers. This was particularly the case for the city of Versailles located downstream of Paris. The municipality was historically supplied by Marly’s machine, which drew from the Seine, whose quality was 5 Scientists have since realised that beyond this observation based on oxygen only, the aquatic environment is not “purified”, but remains enriched in nutrients (Pont and Haidvogl 2016).

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constantly deteriorating due to Parisian waste. In 1874, health authorities declared this water from the Seine undrinkable. In the absence of an immediate alternative, the polluted water remained distributed in the drinking water network of Versailles until 1894, and then was gradually replaced by pumped in groundwater and the purchase of drinking water from the city of Paris via the Arve aqueduct (Dmitrieva 2017). Self-purification indicators (saprobic index) were not routinely measured in France as part of public monitoring for action. Instead, mining and navigation services relied on proven damage to set discharge limits for sacrificed rivers. The phenomenon of self-purification in France remained in the academic sphere and outside administrative institutions until 2006. When the water basin financial agencies were created to clean up rivers in 1964, engineers and economists responsible for planning the cleanup effort needed to estimate the self-purification capacity of rivers according to their flow and oxygenation. This phenomenon was cited and used as justification, but the motive was not really measured. As fishermen had opposed the legislative establishment of river quality classes, the 1964 law referred the question of the desirable amount of pollution in each river to local decrees. Only one was passed in France on a river in Normandy, the Vire. Depollution remained a qualitative endeavor. Later, the motive could have been mobilized when instream flows were imposed downstream of structures located in the river beds. However, in 1984, the law set these flows at one-tenth of the average flow, regardless of this motive. In 2006, a new law on water and aquatic environments revisited this ratio by opening up the possibility of adjusting instream flow according to the situation. The term “self-purification” was then included in the regulatory part of the environmental code in the list of ecological processes to be taken into account when setting the value of this flow6. This motive was also called for in 2010 to take into account the specificity of white water in the division into “water bodies” in application of the European Water Framework Directive: “these [white water] environments are of great benefit, in particular because their self-purification capacities are higher than 6 “Taking into account the flow required to maintain the balance of aquatic ecosystems, in particular the flow referred to in Article L. 214-18 (life, circulation and reproduction of species, sediment transport, self-purification, temperature), the quality objectives and possibly the water management plan provided for in Article L. 212-3”, annex to Article R214-85 of the Environment Code.

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those of more stagnant environments. Therefore, in order to comply as closely as possible with the spirit of the Water Framework Directive of 23 October 2000, a general approach to reclaiming these white water environments must be pursued”7. From these two examples, we see that the motives instituted are not necessarily perceived according to a single ontology. The motive of selfpurification, which refers to the original myth of robust and purifying nature, refers to a totemic perception. However, this has not prevented scientists and authorities regulating urban discharges in European countries neighboring France from approaching it in a naturalistic way by quantifying the ecological processes associated with this purification. In France, the sacrificed river was also perceived according to two non-naturalistic ontologies. It was both an animic motive associated with the reciprocal obligations of urban life and an analogical motive attached to the prospective narrative of progress. However, these two ontologies excluded a more naturalistic understanding of this motive: the act of sacrificing a river disqualifies any investigation into it. The disappearance of the motive for the sacrificed river, which justified all authorizations discharging into a watercourse, indicates a change that could not have been demonstrated by a study focusing only on policy instruments. 3.1.2. Fish mortality, a conservative motive for banning pollution The sacrificed river and self-purification are motives that have encouraged river pollution. On the other hand, fish mortality in the form of “belly-up fish” is an environmental motive for pollution control. Exploring the trajectory of this motive in France reveals a political struggle within the state apparatus between the penalization and decriminalization of accidental pollution, where not only corporate interests (forests, mining, industrial and urban) are at stake, but also an opposition between conservative and liberal political doctrines.

7 Decree of January 12, 2010 on the methods and criteria to be used to delimit and classify water bodies and draw up the inventory of fixtures provided for in Article R. 212-3 of the Environment Code.

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“Unsacrificed” rivers were not free from episodes of pollution. They were sometimes subject to leaks from establishments that did not have a discharge authorization but whose infrastructure was defective. Against their “will”, the fish bodies in these rivers became evidence of these all too frequent “accidents”, which were sometimes malicious. In this context, fish mortality became a motive to regulate these “accidents”, which dead fish made visible. To understand how fish became the instituted evidence of pollution, it is necessary to recall the accessibility of angling in France, unlike in other European countries. In France, this leisure activity has been the most popular in terms of affiliation to a sports federation, ahead of football. It is not reserved for an elite but recruits from all socio-professional categories, particularly in the field of “business, small or large, artisanal or industrial” (Barthélémy 2003, p. 156). In 1982, 54% of skilled workers said they fished. This still amounted to more than 30% in 1998, while the number of fishermen fell by half between 1970 and 2000 (Barthélémy 2003, p. 129 and p. 157). The popularity of angling in France is due to the actors who promoted it as a leisure activity at the end of the 19th Century and to its access modalities. These two characteristics stemmed from its politicization on an ideological axis opposing, on the one hand, a liberal doctrine, favorable to free enterprise and unfavorable to state management, and, on the other hand, a conservative doctrine concerned with preserving a moral social order. As we will see, this opposition cannot be reduced to a conflict of interest between industrialists and fishermen. Before the French Revolution, river fishing was an inherited privilege. Fishing by those who had not inherited this privilege was an act of poaching, which was an offense under the absolute monarchy by an ordinance of Colbert (1669). Poaching techniques of the time led to the prohibition against: “all persons throwing into the rivers lime, poison nuts, Levant shells, mummy and other drugs or baits, under penalty of corporal punishment”8. The exclusivity of the right to fish was abolished after the Revolution. On private land, the right of ownership included the right to fish. In the public domain, all those wishing to fish were able to enjoy free access

8 Ordinance of Colbert of August 13, 1669 on water and forests, art. 14, Title XXXI (Farinetti 2014). The terms that were later incorporated into the legislation are indicated by italics.

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to the rivers for a few years9. Yet, before 1860, angling did not enjoy a high social status. In 1857, an amateur published a book to promote this practice; he underlines in his introduction the contempt it inspired in France at the time: “Why is it then that in France fishing is generally considered as a recreation that should be left to people of little means, or as a profession whose practice should be left to special craftsmen? … the ignorance that reigns among the elite, with regard to fishing, its processes and its pleasures. Much wiser are our neighbors and friends the English! They honored fishing as one of the exercises worthy of a gentleman, and whose practices constitutes what they call the collective name of sport. … the tools used to catch fish are treated, in Great Britain, with that luxury of comfort that the English like to surround themselves with” (Guillemard 1857, p. 4). Before fishing became the leisure activity we know today, a few years after 1789, net fishermen complained about a depopulation of rivers and asked the State to regulate access to river fishing (Barthélémy 2003, Malange 2005). The majority of the body of civil engineers in charge of state-owned rivers argued in favor of a liberal doctrine granting rights by concession of the public domain, as was the case for plants using hydraulic power (Barraqué 2002). They won their case. The right to fish on public property was then the subject of tenders10, i.e. a form of monetarization of the right to fish (Ingold 2011, Marc 2006, Haghe 1998). These tenders concerned fishing methods using nets or gear. Angling, considered to be very inefficient, remained freely tolerated. To secure the fishing monopoly granted to the successful bidder on stateowned rivers, the 1804 law entrusted the policing of fishing to the water and forest services and poaching was once again considered an offense. Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 weakened government support for industrialists on the one hand and liberal doctrine on the other. Fishermen who held 9 This duration is still the subject of debate among historians. 10 Legal doctrines concerning the right of use on non-public rivers were debated throughout the 19th Century until 1898. This controversy was not specific to France. Doctrines on water rights evolved considerably during this period in the rest of Europe (Ingold 2008) and in the United States (Sax et al. 2006).

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tendering contracts took this opportunity to accuse industrial discharges of depopulating rivers and called for stricter regulation of polluting installations. However, to shift the blame for fish depletion to pollution required the ability to distinguish its specific impact from that of overfishing. The disappearance of fish due to overfishing did not leave any traces. However, in the event of pollution, fish did not disappear; on the contrary, they became visible (see Box 3.2). Fish mortality was a manifestation that everyone could see, without being experts. Under the Ancien Régime it was already used as evidence of practices that caused poisoning. The pattern was temporally specified as it systematically followed episodes of pollution. It was also specifically located downstream of sources of pollution. Fishermen mobilized to make the public authorities recognize this distinction. It takes a trained eye to see live fish in even a clear river because the light reflected on the water surface masks the dark backs of most species. On the other hand, natural evolution has provided them with clear bellies so that they escape the predators that see them from below against the light. This invisibility of fish is normal. When pollution suddenly compromises aquatic life, fish that cannot escape perish and drift with the current to the first obstacle. We can then easily observe these white bellies turned upside down as their swim bladder makes them float on the surface of the water. Box 3.2. Fish mortality, a visual and non-expert clue on pollution

In 1829, the Restoration Government adopted a law on public rivers that broadened the definition of poaching. Taking the wording from Colbert’s 1669 ordinance, article 25 stipulated that “anyone who throws drugs or baits into the water that are likely to intoxicate or destroy the fish shall be punished by a fine of 35 to 100 francs and imprisonment from one month to three months. Those who have used dynamite or other similar products will be liable to a fine of 200 to 500 francs and imprisonment for three to five months”. While the 1804 law defined poaching as theft from the successful bidder, the 1829 law associated it with a naturalistic environmental motive associated with a cause, a toxic discharge, and a consequence, fish destruction. With this definition, polluting industrial discharges were tantamount to poaching. The law did not provide for exception clauses for manufacturers authorized by the mining inspection services or the navigation services. As under the Ancien Régime, it once again brought legal

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uncertainty to the attention of industrialists. The offense of fish destruction was politicized as an element of conservative doctrine wanted by the Royalist Restoration Government. In 1859, the Court of Cassation confirmed that an industrial discharge causing fish mortality was a case of poaching under the 1829 Act (Lestel et al., 2013, p. 227). The Water and Forest Service was not very keen on enforcing this ban on fish poisoning and was reluctant to implement the 1829 law (Lestel et al., 2013). When a court of law released an industrialist whose establishment was authorized under the 1810 decree despite the fish mortality report, they did not appeal. Until 1977, these Water and Forest Services were under the supervision of the treasury, whose main concern was the forest. Foresters and mine operators shared common interests. The latter bought wood from the former for the gallery frames. This made the Water and Forest Department quite sensitive to the concerns of industrialists and those of the mining department, which controlled the industries. Fish and pollution problems remained peripheral to this common interest. The Corps of Road and Bridge Engineers, on the other hand, was in competition with the Corps of Mines in granting water rights on state-owned rivers. Cities, factories, irrigation canals, shipping and mining required diversion works. The Roads and Bridges Department was in the position of arbitrator. It claimed the competency of water and fisheries police and obtained it in 1862 under the Second Empire (1851–1870). Laurence Lestel and her colleagues noted a change in the policy of the water police services from 1879 onwards (Lestel et al., 2013), which were then more likely to appeal first instance court decisions for stricter decisions against polluters. In 1870, the industrialists managed to convince the government to issue a decree to open up the possibility of a criminal transaction in the event of a breach of the 1829 law. The criminal transaction opened the possibility for the non-complying person to extinguish the legal proceedings by paying a fine negotiated with the water police. It did not exclude compensation for possible victims (civil settlement). However, it avoided the moral blame of a judicial conviction for the industrialist and allowed a form of monetarization of environmental degradation. However, the road and bridge services refused to implement this decree. From 1879 onwards, they regularly appealed pollution judgments that did not cite the 1829 law and obtained prison sentences for several industrialists (Lestel et al., 2013). Thus, although the water and forest officers’ corps during the Second Empire was predominantly statist and fairly favorable to the royalists in matters of forest

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management (Decocq et al., 2016), in matters of accidental pollution, it rather resisted the implementation of the 1829 instrument. It was the bridge engineers, paradoxically more liberal in general, who used this text. This is explained by the proximity between foresters and mining interests and the competition between mining and navigation services. Fish mortality continues to be a motive for public action in the fight against pollution. As it does not require any device to be perceived, amateurs can use it to report an environmental crime. The association of this motive with the ban on the destruction of fish (introduced in 1829 and updated in 1984 with the Fisheries Act) has proved to be the most effective tool for identifying pollution and making it public. In 1994, Pierre Lascoumes noted that 750–800 minutes were drawn up each year for discharges causing fish mortality (Lascoumes 1994). Christelle Gramaglia showed how the fishermen’s association ANPER-TOS, founded in 1958, sued several cases of pollution of industrial origin (failure to respect flow rates, poisoning, etc.) using the motive of fish mortality, which constituted a “legal means” before the courts (Gramaglia 2006). The association set up a network of amateur fishermen and lawyers capable of articulating the knowledge necessary to make each fish mortality situation a blameworthy case. Beyond its naturalistic perception (a physical factor causing mortality), fish mortality is also perceived in relation to a moral principle of prohibiting the killing of fish other than for and by fishing. This principle constitutes another interiority of the motive, to use Virginie Tournay’s words. The poisoning of fish calls into question the revolutionary right of free access to rivers (a right that was later transformed into access under cheap conditions, as we will see later) for line fishing, provided fishermen report poaching. The guarantee of free access against a poaching police is a reciprocal obligation between fishing enthusiasts and water police services. Recognizing poaching using the visual pattern of “belly-up” fish is part of this institution of an animistic nature. It is important to note that the 1829 law could paradoxically only be used in rivers that were sufficiently favorable to fish life, for the presence of dead fish to establish the offense. Use of the instrument required the environmental motive. However, this motive, which referred to an animistic institution (the right of the citizens who inherited the Revolution to fish by angling provided they renounced poaching) was not enough to do justice. A naturalistic investigation was still needed to define the cause of mortality.

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While some rivers were sacrificed, the fish habitat purpose of others was reaffirmed by the prohibition of harming fish. Then, when the motive of the sacrificed river disappeared, all the rivers became administratively favorable to aquatic life. Provided that there were a few fish before the pollution incident, even in a state of survival, the water police could now issue a ticket for the sightings of “belly-up” fish. 3.1.3. Trout, an ambiguous motive between liberalism and nationalism Trout is the most paradoxical environmental motive of the water quality control policy. While angling was free, trout farming justified a fee-based system of fishing licenses. This motive, initially promoted by a very antiState logic, has become the banner of a centralized policy by the State. The success of artificial trout reproduction was key in the process of instituting trout as an environmental motive, but today, it is in the name of the natural reproduction of this species that public action is being taken. These contradictions can be explained by the political work of the actors who have succeeded in attaching this living form to a wide variety of causes. At the end of the 19th Century, the discourse denouncing the depopulation of rivers (Thibault 1993) became dominant. Sarah Bešlagić (2013) finds evidence of this, for example, in Senate debates. On July 1, 1879, the Upper House appointed “a commission to collect, by means of an inquiry, information on the state of the river and sea waters of the time (from the point of view of fishery products), as well as on the best restocking processes and measures to be taken to maintain their fertility” (Beslagic 2013, p. 151). Senator George, Chairman of the Commission, wrote in his report: “Unfortunately, today, our waters, which are partly depopulated, no longer even provide enough fish to meet the needs of domestic consumption.” The commission sent a questionnaire to the Corps of Road and Bridge Engineers to diagnose the condition, causes of destruction and possibilities for restocking (Beslagic 2013). At the same time, from the British example, interest in angling spread to France and became widespread in the late 19th Century (Corbin 1995). In the aftermath of the Paris Commune, fishing was celebrated in specialist magazines and official speeches as a non-violent leisure activity, associated with the rural environment (while the majority of fishermen union members

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were urban dwellers who fished in the city) and able to provide the poorest with cheap protein (Barthélémy 2003, pp. 102–123). Companies or angling unions were created throughout the country from 1890 (Malange 2007). While angling was tolerated without authorization in the public domain, these companies contracted tender fishing lots to exclude any other form of fishing and to guarantee for themselves the control of poaching, the fight against water pollution and the restocking of rivers. In fact, the multiplication of unions and their success ensured that their members had relatively cheap, if not free, access to rivers. The restocking endeavor also guaranteed the presence of fish. Jean-François Malange showed the close link between the emergence of these unions and the spread of trout eggs, produced by artificial fertilization, organized from the Trocadero aquarium (in Paris) by its director Georges Jousset du Bellesme. The liberal orientation of this repopulation was clear: “This is the goal we were pursuing by organizing a Fish Farm Congress in 1889. We sought to repopulate all the rivers in France by the forces of private initiative alone, and it was towards this goal that, until 1900, all our efforts were directed”11. Carole Barthélémy notes the sacralization of trout in fish management (Barthélémy 2003, pp. 124–139). This species, the artificial fertilization of which had just been rediscovered, became a new environmental motive, emblem of French angling. In terms of its spatial distribution, this cold fresh water fish, familiar with small, medium-sized mountain rivers and poorly adapted to urban rivers, was prized by fishermen from the wealthiest social strata, including leaders of fishing unions, who could travel far from cities to fly fish for it. Fario trout (Salmo trutta L.), considered as the French12 wild trout, was nevertheless reared in many rivers, including those where it could not reproduce, and survived in an unfavorable environment before being fished or perishing by pollution. However, its ecological requirements were celebrated to testify to the good state of the rivers or to act as sentinels in the event of pollution. The unions thus gradually transformed free access to angling into an economic good reserved for club members. The low level of contributions 11 Jousset du Bellesme, La pisciculture en France de 1884–1900. L’aquarium du Trocadéro, l’enseignement municipal de pisciculture, les sociétés de pêche, l’initiative privée, Paris, 1909, pp. 134–135, cited by Malange (ibid.), p. 93, our emphases. 12 Despite recent differences between Atlantic and Mediterranean strains, see Caudron et al. (2006).

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and the guarantee of finding fish undoubtedly explain the consent of the members. National and domesticated, trout has become an environmental motive associated with monetarization instruments. In addition to paid access to state-owned rivers, the unions offered the possibility of “repairing” cases of accidental pollution. Their representatives filed a civil suit in the cases of pollution and claimed their expenses for restocking to obtain compensation. Scientist Louis Léger established formulas to assess the “biogenic capacity” of rivers, i.e. the quantity of trout that a river could “normally” accommodate, which served as the basis for calculating compensation (Lestel et al., 2013). The liberal agenda of trade unions and angling companies faded as they became more widespread and their membership grew. The trout motive was articulated to instruments with other meanings. Fishing associations were created with statutes of association under the 1901 law. Associations, unions and fishing companies demanded the exclusivity of the right to angling throughout the entire public river domain in order to be able to exclude individuals who fished without membership and who were accused by these structures of poaching. They obtained it under the Vichy government. The 1941 law created approved fishing and fish farming associations (AAPP) to which all fishermen had to belong in order to exercise a right to fish on public property. It was now prohibited to fish by angling without being a member of an AAPP. All the pre-existing structures were converted into AAPPs, grouped into federations at the departmental level. It is difficult to interpret this instrument as an extension (for angling) of the liberal system of granting fishing rights set up in 1804. Indeed, the AAPPs escaped the auction system. They were given the right to fish, provided they were authorized (approved) by the State. This exclusive allocation of the right to angle on public property was accompanied by a zoning of the entire river system into two categories of watercourses in which rearing practices, authorized sizes and fishing dates had to be different, the first category being specifically dedicated to trout13. For trout fishermen who appreciated the preserved rivers in which they could naturally reproduce, first-class zoning 13 The Environmental Code has taken over and amended this legislation, but article L436-5 of the Code states: “The classification of watercourses, canals and water bodies into two categories: (a) the first category includes those mainly populated by trout and those where it seems desirable to provide special protection for fish of this species; (b) the second category includes all other watercourses, canals and bodies of water subject to the provisions of this title”.

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made visible in the public space the specificity of trout habitat that homogeneous rearing tended to compensate. It also required riparian owners whose watercourses were in relation to the public domain to manage their fish in a manner consistent with their salmonid vocation (favorable to trout and salmon). The authoritarian Vichy regime facilitated the adoption of a status derogating from the right of free association (1901) and the introduction of zoning imposed on private owners. While the trout motive was mainly politicized at the end of the 19th Century in reference to poverty alleviation and social peace, the distinction between the first and second category rivers reflected a greening of this motive, which was now attributed to ecological effects and causes (specific habitat, impacts of fishing during the breeding season). Classification was also a way of reaffirming government authority over all rivers, including those that were not state-owned. The administrative reference to trout (its desired presence in first category rivers, its absence in others) has thus been introduced throughout the national territory. In 1948, a High Council for Fisheries was established, financed by fishermen’s contributions through the fishing federations, which trained national riverkeepers and made them available to the federations to combat poaching and pollution. This water police exercised state powers while supported through private financing scheme until 2003 (Bouleau and Gramaglia 2015). Systematic river monitoring was only introduced in France in 1971, with a first pollution inventory to quantify the pollution control effort required by the 1964 Water Act. Although, according to fishermen, no quality objectives were enshrined in the law, non-legislative objectives were used to reason with the state services. Three qualities of water were defined (inter-ministerial circular of July 29, 1971): quality 1, which made it possible to satisfy the most demanding uses (drinking water supply, fish life), which would have led to a huge national pollution control effort given the estimated average pollution, and qualities 2 and 3, which corresponded to pollution control objectives that were each time half less ambitious. The biologists in charge of fisheries at the Ministry of Agriculture relied on preestablished fish zoning to justify the need to distinguish a more demanding objective (1a) for trout rivers (Bouleau et al., 2017). The trout motive made it possible to reaffirm in the water sector a distinction already established in the fisheries sector.

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The trout motive was further ecologized after 1981, thanks to a window of opportunity to regulate fishing. The Left’s presidential program had announced policies favorable to leisure activities. Michel Crépeau and his technical adviser Guy Tufféry were both great fishing enthusiasts and negotiated with fishermen some simplifications of the right to fish (more lines allowed per individual) and a greening of fish management. On the one hand, it was a question of making the owners’ right to fish conditional on a management obligation and, on the other hand, of enshrining in law the protection of aquatic ecosystems. The Left elected representatives politicized the first proposal as a restriction on property rights, and they presented ecosystem protection as a progressive14 reform. The law thus required authorization for activities likely to destroy fish habitats (spawning grounds, feeding areas or food reserves). It also secured instream flows downstream of all structures built in the riverbed. In practice, the regulatory estimation of instream flows was predominantly based on a method that models trout ecological preferences (micro-habitat method applied to this species). Finally, the Fisheries Act provides for the classification of watercourses affected by the presence of migratory fish, for which structures across rivers must be equipped with fish passes. The first decree adopted to establish this list was based primarily on the presence of the fario trout15. This species does not migrate to the sea, but does indeed move significantly within the zoning that is favorable to it, provided it does not encounter any obstacles (too high weirs, dams, etc.). Since the 1990s, the authorities in charge of fish management and the Ministry of the Environment have questioned the primacy of rearing practices in favor of restoring natural habitats and ecological continuity (free movement of species and sediments). The High Council for Fisheries, which coordinated the assessment of the biogenic capacity of rivers to optimize rearing operations, has shifted its expertise towards the qualification and preservation of habitats (inventories of obstacles, ecological recommendations for works subject to authorization). Fish farms approved for restocking have been subject to stricter regulations and even some stigmatization by environmental associations and the Ministry of the Environment, inherited from former pollution cases (Bouleau et al., 2017).

14 Interview with Guy Tufféry, 2015. 15 Decree of May 14, 1990 adopted pursuant to Article L. 232-6 of the Rural Code.

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The adoption of the European Water Framework Directive (2000), which aims to restore a state close to the “reference state” for all natural waters, has also redirected legitimate public action towards environments rather than species. The term “fish farming” has disappeared from the names of the departmental federations and their approved associations, which were renamed “fishing and protection of aquatic environments” by the Water and Aquatic Environments Act of 2006. The trout motive has thus been detached from its artificial origin to be increasingly associated with environments favorable to its life cycle (continuity between spawning grounds, feeding and growth areas and resting areas). These multiple politicizations give the trout motive a variety of ontologies. It is an animistic motive associated with the accessibility of angling for all fishermen who pay their dues. This motive justifies the practice of rearing fish and transactions for the benefit of fishing federations. It is also a more totemic motive that is articulated on French territory. Finally, it is in a more naturalistic register associated with good-quality white and cold water. This interpretative plasticity of the motive is one of the elements of its success that is not found in the motives subsequently instituted, such as that of migratory fish. However, following this motive, there is also a change in the public policies that refer to it. Initially promoted as a currency of exchange between fishermen, then between fishermen and polluters through a system of civil and criminal transactions, trout has come to represent good-quality waters, and then the environments where they can reproduce naturally. 3.1.4. Migratory fish as a motive for banning dams The interest in the presence of migratory fish in French rivers is one of the signs of the greening of water policies in this country. This politicized motive during ecological opposition to dams now embodies a policy that is justified by a European narrative. From the 1980s onwards, several environmental and fish-related causes were equated with the “highly migratory fish” motive, which included fish that spent part of their life cycle in fresh water and part in the sea (shad, eel, lamprey, salmon and sea trout). As these species are disturbed by the

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presence of dams or weirs across watercourses, they have often been involved in controversies related to these structures. Within the “highly migratory fish” motive, salmon retains a special place. The emotion associated with the spectacle of leaping salmon was staged through guided tours, observation stations16 and reports17. Subsequently, fish ladders were built so that other migratory species could be observed through portholes. These various forms of aesthetic engagement have crystallized the motive of migratory fish, independently of any public policy instrument. Then, the motive was politicized at the European level and stabilized in law. In France, large hydroelectric dams date back to the 20th Century when fishermen initiated the first political struggles against their construction without referring specifically to the motive of migratory fish. Thus, in the Rhône basin, when the Brégnier-Cordon dam was built in 1984, fishermen mobilized to demand a higher instream flow than that considered by the Rhône National Company, arguing that the Haut-Rhône site was rich in fish resources. At that time, ecologists did not engage in such negotiations. The regional federation of nature protection associations (FRAPNA), which followed the discussions on Brégnier-Cordon, became more involved in the subsequent projects in Sault-Brenaz, and Loyettes, at the confluence of the Ain and Rhône rivers (abandoned project) by mobilizing maps of threatened biodiversity (Bouleau 2014, Michelot 1990). This Rhodanian experience has fed ecological struggles on the Loire (joint activists and shared expertise). It was on the Loire that salmon became an environmental motive common to ecologists and fishermen against the Serre de la Fare dam project (1988–1994) and then for the dismantling of the Poutès-Monistrol hydroelectric power plant on the Allier (2003–2007)18. The motive for dams, which was initially politicized in terms of instrumental use (hydroelectric, multi-use), was greened as “a major obstacle to the sustainable return of large salmon of natural origin on the Loire-Allier axis” (Bérard 2007). On the Rhine, the eel was the first migratory species to be drawn into the spotlight during a spectacular pollution event. In 1986, following a fire at a 16 For example, the “station innovante de contrôle et d’observation des saumons à Vichy”, created in 1996 (Bérard 2007). 17 A report on the migration of salmon on the Garonne River was broadcast on the French TV channel News 2 on 05/05/2016. 18 On the Loire, see Hayes, G. (2002). Environmental Protest and the State in France. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. On the Allier, see Bérard Y. (2007), Et au milieu coule une rivière. Socio-logos [Online], 2).

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Sandoz factory in Basel, a polluting discharge caused the sudden and spectacular death of eels throughout the international course of the Rhine. This event was locally politicized to strengthen cross-border cooperation on water policy, and then promoted at the European level by the Commission and the countries with the greatest environmental impact (Bouleau 2017a). The international plan for salmon restoration on the Rhine dates from this period. In France, Brice Lalonde, reporter for the Sandoz damage investigation mission for the government, and Jean-Luc Laurent, then director of the Rhine-Meuse Water Agency, met each other for the first time during this event. The first became Secretary of State (1988) and then Minister of the Environment (1989) and asked the second to take over the new water department created at the Ministry in 1992. These two personalities were convinced that river works and structures disturbed the ecological quality of rivers. They paved the way for the 1992 Water Act, which made weirs higher than 35 cm subject to authorization. Jean-Luc Laurent also participated in drafting the European framework directive on the ecological quality of water, which was abandoned in 1994 and later resumed to produce the European framework directive on water (Bouleau 2017a). The convergence of struggles for salmon, eels and all highly migratory species dates back to the late 1980s. In 1989, the French fishing federations formed two associations for the restoration and management of migratory fish, on the Loire (Logrami) and on the Garonne and Dordogne rivers (Migado). A Rhodanian counterpart was created in 1993 (Migrateurs Rhône Méditerranée). These associations would then sit on the migratory fish management committees (Comités de gestion des poissons migrateurs) (COGEPOMI) created in each major basin19. Following the ban on salmon fishing on the Loire due to population collapse, these associations have highlighted the decline in highly migratory populations since the 19th Century20 and called for plans to restore these species, which were already the subject of international attention. The “highly migratory fish” motive is part of a narrative of the harms of industrialization and extends spatially throughout Europe. At an international level, several non-binding public

19 Decree of February 16, 1994. 20 Environmental historians consider that the decline of salmon is much older (Lenders et al. 2016).

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policy instruments have existed since the 1970s to preserve biodiversity in general, such as the Washington Convention or CITES on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (1973) or the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (1979). Wild terrestrial and aquatic migratory species are covered by the Bonn Convention (1979). More specifically, salmon fishing levels are recommended by the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (NASCO) established by convention in 1984. The protection of other species is more recent. The European regulation for eels dates from only 2007. The European Water Framework Directive (2000), which requires new water monitoring and the setting of restoration objectives, provided a political opportunity to affirm the importance of these highly migratory species in the French Environmental Code (Law on Water and Aquatic Environments, 2006) with a new classification of rivers into two lists, the first prohibiting new structures and the second imposing equipment, allowing the free movement of migratory fish21. This “list 2” gave rise to an inventory of obstacles to ecological continuity carried out at ONEMA22 by employees, many of whom came from the High Council for Fisheries. A total of 60,000 obstacles (dams and weirs) were identified in 2011 in the metropolitan territory, more than 1,500 of which needed to be removed as a priority. Fishermen’s associations and environmentalists have greened the “highly migratory fish” motive by stigmatizing the obstacles that made rivers impassable for these species. This politicization masks the “socionatural” character of restoring continuity. On the Garonne, for example, the Migado association organizes an annual catch of young salmon upstream of the dams to transport them in trucks downstream in order to avoid the ruin of restoration efforts due to losses caused by turbines during downward migration. During the run, salmon use fish ladders and elevators, which are impressive structures. The restoration of ecological continuity thus requires large-scale civil engineering constructions. In addition, there are impacts on migratory fish populations other than dams: pollution, fishing pressure at sea and predation by catfish in rivers. Finally, regardless of the function of these structures (hydroelectricity, sanitary barrier for fish farms, support role for 21 Article L. 214-17. 22 L’Office national des eaux et des milieux aquatiques (the French National Water and Aquatic Environment Board).

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low water levels for irrigation or heritage and tourism for old mills), the greening of dams calls into question the ownership of sectoral actors on their social problematization. One case is particularly interesting to explore in terms of institutional and environmental motives: the cultural heritage of water mills. It is only in recent years that water mills became a source of interest to the Mission de l’inventaire général du patrimoine culturel (Mission on the General Inventory of Cultural Heritage) at the French Ministry of Culture. Through the combined efforts of several historians and archaeologists from the mission and the academic world, studies have been launched to establish in scientific and administrative language the reference vocabulary on ports, fisheries, mills, weirs and dikes in the fluvio-estuarine environment for the purpose of preventive archaeological excavations, before the structures are dismantled by water policy23. The mill has become an environmental motive of the Ministry of Culture, in the sense of a form present in the codified environment to facilitate its identification and a motivation to act in favor of a fluvial national heritage. At the same time, a network of associations made up of two national federations for the promotion of mills and an enlightened amateur with a dedicated blog24 have launched a controversy on the restoration of continuity (Juigné and Cantard 2015). They argued that there were multiple causes for migratory fish decline, that rivers in western France had specificities that were overlooked (Germaine and Barraud 2013b, Germaine and Lespez 2014, Germaine and Barraud 2013a) and that the concept of reference in the framework Directive could be understood differently (Bouleau and Pont 2015). This network played on both the heritage argument and the interests of small hydropower. Without much publicity, this network was able to mobilize the Senate (written question to the government)25 and the National Assembly (round table on the subject)26. It is on the grounds of mill protection that the Environmental Code article related to on listed watercourses for migratory fish was completed in 2016 to refer to the obligations relating to heritage protection under the Town Planning Code. In this way, mill promoters succeeded in establishing an environmental motive that competes with highly migratory fish. 23 Interview with the Mission on the General Inventory, 2015. 24 Observatoire de la continuité écologique http://continuite-ecologique.fr/. 25 Written question No 21250 by Mr François Bonhomme (Tarn-et-Garonne – Les Républicains) OJ Senate of 14/04/2016 – p. 1542. 26 Round table 23/11/2016: “Quelles rivières pour demain ?”.

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The migratory fish motive is a naturalistic motive that attests to the presence of habitats favorable to these species. However, it also relies on a European account of the decline in numbers since a golden age that would be pre-industrial. Through their sea–river journey and the mixing of populations from different countries, these fish come to embody the European territory in a totemic way. They are also associated with a prospective account of ecological modernization (Bouleau 2011, Boudes 2017, Béal 2016) which sees in the accumulation of restoration cases a general trend towards a better consideration of biodiversity, without establishing a general assessment on the consumption of the resources necessary for this modernization; we will return to this in Chapter 5. 3.1.5. Eutrophication, a European motive Eutrophication is a motive politicized at the European level. It was then incorporated into national regulations by transposing European directives. Eutrophication is an ecological process caused by the enrichment of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) in an aquatic environment. When velocity and temperature conditions are suitable and neither nitrogen nor phosphorus is limiting, this phenomenon results in the proliferation of algae and aquatic plants. These plants asphyxiate the aquatic environment at night, which can lead to fish mortality. The degradation of algae by bacteria also releases foul-smelling or even toxic gases. Green tides on Breton beaches and algal blooms in the North Sea are manifestations of eutrophication. It can also affect lakes and rivers. The phenomenon of eutrophication was first observed in lakes. From the 1930s onwards, scientific publications in limnology multiplied on this subject. Observations were made in lakes and estuaries in Japan, Europe, Switzerland and North America. This has been the case in Lake Nantua (Jura massif) since the 1920s and again in the 1950s (Hubault 1957). On Lake Geneva, shared between France and Switzerland, eutrophication was highlighted by the health services monitoring bathing and fishing. Their alerts led to the establishment of a commission, which in 1960 became the International Commission for the Protection of the Waters of Lake Geneva and the Rhône Against Pollution (Commission Internationale pour la Protection des Eaux du lac Léman et du Rhône Contre la Pollution) (CIPEL).

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As early as 1981, Switzerland limited the phosphate content of laundry detergents to 30% and banned them completely in 1985 (Barroin 1994). However, in France, for several years, the problem of eutrophication was politically confined to transboundary waters and international discussions. However, as early as 1960, the phenomenon was regularly mentioned by specialists in the central administration (Nisbet 1968). Water quality experts at the Ministry of Agriculture attended the standardization meetings on eutrophication measurement in a dedicated working group within the FAO27 and mentioned the political decisions taken in the United States to manage the problem. However, before the 1990s, eutrophication was not addressed in national public policies. As will be seen in the next section, in some basins, eutrophication was used as a justification for additional investments to treat nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater treatment plants, although the main sources of phosphorus and nitrogen in water were due to laundry phosphates and agricultural nitrogen fertilizers, respectively. In France, the chemical industry opposed a regulatory reduction in the use of phosphates in laundry until 1990, organizing doubt in the controversy over the respective causes of nitrogen and phosphorus in eutrophication (Barroin 1989). Let us look for a moment at the motives used by industrialists in this controversy. In 1988, the German laundry company Henkel, which had just bought the Le Chat brand from a Marseille-based company, launched a phosphate-free detergent on the French market with a campaign promoting its “contribution to environmental protection”. The political context was favorable to ecological ideas. The Greens obtained 10% of the votes in the 1989 European elections in France. The new product Le Chat “immediately took 5% of the market share in an already very crowded market” (Libaert 2007, p. 84). The French chemical group Rhône-Poulenc, which was the leading producer of phosphates in Europe, responded with an aggressive campaign that questioned the safety of phosphate-free detergents. This campaign, which was deemed defamatory, was condemned at the beginning of 1990. The image used by the Rhône-Poulenc advertising agency made no reference to eutrophication. It featured a trout, symbol of fish management in France, shown “belly-up”, which is a motive for blaming pollution in court (Figure 3.1). Eutrophication was a motive that did not speak to the French public and was not mentioned in either campaign. At the same time, Rhône-Poulenc compiled a press kit with numerous studies 27 Advisory European Commission for Inlands Waters Fisheries (Commission Européenne Consultative pour les pêches dans les eaux intérieures) (CECPI) of FAO.

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questioning the responsibility of phosphates in eutrophication. The article by the New Observer (from which Figure 3.1 is drawn) remained cautious about interpreting the phenomenon of eutrophication and politicized the controversy between the two industrial groups in nationalistic terms: “… the phenomenon of eutrophication is very complex, and phosphates are probably not the only cause… So, on the one hand, you have Rhône-Poulenc, the famous French multinational state corporation, … And, on the other hand, the German group Henkel, which has bought our dear old brand Le Chat… It was – for once – the Frenchman (Rhône-Poulenc) who opened fire against the German…” (Gruhier 1990).

Figure 3.1. Two French posters advertising laundry detergents in 1989. On the left, the advert for the brand Le Chat belonging to the German group Henkel says “High quality. Phosphate-free”. On the right, the advertising campaign financed by RhônePoulenc denigrates the previous one by using the two established motives of the water quality control policy: the “belly-up” fish and the trout. It says “Who says that phosphate-free detergents don’t harm the environment? Certainly not scientific studies”

Symmetrically, farmers would refuse to address the issue of nitrates. The subject would be put on the agenda by Brice Lalonde, Secretary of State for the Environment in 1990, who publicly called on them to apply the polluterpays principle28. Two European directives were adopted in 1991 to combat excess nitrates from agricultural sources and phosphorus from urban sources. They required Member States to define two types of zoning: vulnerable zones (nitrate 28 “Des lois et un goutte-à-goutte”, Le Figaro, February 21, 1990.

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directive) and sensitive zones (urban wastewater directive). The motive for eutrophication appeared in regulations with the first decrees issued to transpose these directives in 1993 (vulnerable areas) and 1994 (sensitive areas), with an underestimation of the areas concerned. France was the subject of four disputes over the insufficient transposition of these directives between 2002 and 201429. Several actors played on the triple ecological control of phosphates, nitrogen and currents to question their responsibility or postpone the requirements imposed on them. In Brittany, local authorities and breeders were passing the buck. Pig and cattle farms blamed each other (Levain 2014). The controversy was relaunched in 2008 with the discomfort of a horse rider during a walk on a beach in Saint-Michel-en-Grève in the Côtesd’Armor, which transformed the problem into one of health and gave rise to scientific expertise commissioned by the State (Bourblanc 2016). On the Garonne, the river current was not very favorable to the development of algae despite the high levels of nitrates. A controversy arose between scientists looking for further signs of eutrophication in the biofilm developing on the river’s pebbles and municipalities refusing to establish a sensitive area based on these new indices. Like the motive of highly migratory species, the motive for eutrophication is naturalistic. It indicates the excess of nutrients in a slowwater environment. However, it is also based on the myth of the destructive man who soils rivers according to a more totemic ontology of a vulnerable nature. Such consideration of nature contrasts in every respect with the motive for self-purification that emerged late in French law, but had replaced the motive of the sacrificed river in the justifications for authorizing discharges. The idea of a river capable of cleaning up thus justified a margin of negotiation between the State service and polluters. On the contrary, eutrophication shows that the degradation of pollution generates surpluses of nitrogen and phosphorus that alter the ecological functioning of the water, thus reducing the margins for negotiation. 29 On the Nitrates Directive (91/676/EEC): judgment of June 27, 2002 (C-258/00, since regularized) for failure to identify the Bay of the Seine as a vulnerable area; judgment of June 13, 2013 (C-193/12) for omission of several areas affected by eutrophication when reviewing the designation of vulnerable areas in 2007; judgment of September 4, 2014 (C-237/12) for inadequate regulation of spreading conditions in vulnerable areas. On the Urban Wastewater Directive (91/271/EC), judgment of June 16, 2005 (C-191/04) for lack of transmission of information on wastewater treatment plants in sensitive areas.

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3.2. Use of environmental motives in political work Written evidence of the use of environmental motives in public policies reveals only part of the political work of the actors. Nevertheless, the comparison with some foreign situations and the written testimonies show which choices the actors had, how they justified normative orientations and who were the beneficiaries of the decisions. From this panorama, we question the links between political work and the consistency of motives, their materiality, spatiality and temporality (Table 3.1). Do environmental motives structure interactions because of their physical characteristics? Do they impose a specific territoriality? Do their variations over time weaken supposed continuities? These issues are addressed in the functionalist literature through the notions of compatibility or misfit between institutional motives. For example, Christoph Knill and Dirk Lehmkuhl consider that “from an institutional compatibility perspective, changes required by the EU legislation poses (or not) challenges to core motives of national administration tradition” (Knill and Lehmkuhl 2002, p. 267). This current of analysis reifies institutional characteristics that become independent variables to understand possible and impossible changes. In the environmental field, this approach leads to institutional design recommendations so that each socio-ecological component is subject to specific governance (Ekstrom and Young 2009) or so that the contours of a socio-ecological system correspond to the political territory of the institution in charge of it (Varone et al., 2013). However, in practice, we observe that the spatial fit is not necessarily more effective than institutions that must jointly manage the same resource (Moss 2012) and that institutions play on design (Cleaver and Franks 2005). Functionalist authors underestimate the constructed character of a motive and the ability of actors to overcome contradictions and pluralities of rationalities (Behagel and Arts 2013). However, the consistency of motives is not totally independent of their assigned role in political work. Like a sculptor who will not work in the same way with a block of granite and a block of clay, political work adjusts to the consistency of the instituted environmental motives (section 3.2.1). However, the motives studied often belong to several ontologies and do not have the same consistency according to each (section 3.2.2). The actors play on this plurality to put the motives into politics (section 3.2.3).

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Institutionalized environmental motive

Materiality

Spatiality

Temporality

Naturalistic cause associated with this motive

Sacrificed river

Methane bubbles

Urban and industrial river

Timeless

Urban and industrial metabolism

Self-purification

Dissolved oxygen levels drop and return to normal further downstream

Downstream of urban (organic) discharges

Fluctuating according to season and flow

Impact of the discharge and its natural degradation

Fish mortality

Fish floating on the surface of the water

In unsacrificed fish streams

From a few hours to a few days after pollution

Toxic accidental pollution

Fish species

Suitable for white and cold water

Numbers fluctuating according to fishing, poaching, pollution and rearing

Very goodquality water

Highly migratory fish

Shad, lamprey, salmon, eel and sea trout

Rivers connected to the sea and by extension to the entire European territory

Numbers in decline since the 19th Century

Good ecological continuity

Eutrophication

Algae blooms, release of toxic gases

Downstream of urban and agricultural discharges

Every summer as long as the pollution lasts

Excess nutrients

Trout

Table 3.1. Consistency and causality of the motives instituted in water policy in France since 1800

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3.2.1. Adjustment of political work to the consistency of the environmental motives of the water police The materiality of the motives makes them more or less accessible to non-experts. Thus, self-purification, which requires dissolved oxygen measuring devices, is rather a motive that requires expertise, while methane bubbles from the sacrificed river and fish floating in the event of fish mortality are directly perceptible to everyone and succeed in convincing non-specialists (especially judges) in the courts. Trout and highly migratory fish are more likely to be the motives of enlightened amateurs. However, these characteristics are not set in stone. The obviousness of the offense in the event of fish mortality loses its effectiveness in attacking the reputation of an industry if a criminal transaction can extinguish the legal proceedings. Political work can also transform environmental motives. Public policies can make them appear or disappear. Sacrificed rivers and the penal transaction make polluters less identifiable. Conversely, policies imposing fish passes on crossing devices demonstrate the presence of migratory fish to a non-fishing public. Similarly, the spatiality of these motives more or less fits the political territories with which they were politically associated. The highly migratory fish embody through their maritime journey an ecological solidarity on a European scale that gives meaning to international action, but the instruments adopted are part of a national policy. The trout whose fry have been used to stock the entire national territory is in reality only suitable for white and cold waters. Obviously, the incompatibility of the motive with the territorial competence of the actors is not an insurmountable constraint, even though it requires specific political work to manage the gap. On the other hand, when there is a strong correspondence between the spatiality of the motive and the political claim, the motive becomes a resource (among others) in political work. The fall of dissolved oxygen downstream of medium-sized cities becomes a means of negotiating and controlling their pollution control efforts. This motive was used by the German authorities to determine the levels of treatment of city effluents, but the French authorities allowed the Paris conurbation to pollute the Seine as far as Versailles (1874) and then Rouen (in the 1960s). Here, we find what Emmanuel Négrier calls urban contingency (Négrier 2007). Political reality is not determined by a spatial motive, but the spatial motive is part of a bundle of resources and practices with which political actors deal.

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The same can be said of the temporality of the motives. In our examples, we observe three types of temporality. The motives that rapidly change from one season to the next and according to practices can be easily used in monitoring activities (trout, fish mortality, self-purification), whereas a timeless motive offers a fixed reading of the environment that tends to discourage collective action for change. However, history is never written in stone. Despite its status as a sacrificed river, firmly rooted in the minds of water managers in 1960, the Deûle River has since been restored and an urban park has been built around it. Finally, the temporal pattern of decline, as noted by Deborah Stone (1997), tends to idealize a past reference as a guide for future action. In the case of ecological continuity, paradise lost is imagined before industrialization, while recent studies have shown that the decline of salmon, for example, dates back to medieval history (Lenders et al., 2016). However, the older the reference is, the less credible the reasoning by species is because species interact and the ecological niches left free by extinct species are reused by new ones, making the reversibility of decline more uncertain. By referring to the 19th Century, salmon proponents are adjusting the temporality of the motive to a reasonable time horizon. By their materiality, spatiality, temporality and causality, the motives are more or less coherent with the observation skills of the actors who mobilize them, the stories to which they refer and the territories of which they are part. When this coherence is strong, the motive constitutes a political resource, but political actors also have other material and cognitive resources. 3.2.2. Plurality of ontologies of environmental motives in water policing The six motives studied can be captured according to a naturalistic ontology that associates causes and consequences. The river is “sacrificed” because it is necessary to evacuate the waste; the phenomenon of self-purification is caused by organic discharge and its degradation, that of eutrophication results from excess nutrients, fish mortality reflects the toxicity of a discharge, while trout and migratory fish integrate all the criteria necessary for their biological cycle. However, their institutionalization also requires the distance from this naturalistic reasoning and the affirmation of the permanence of these motives independently of ecological phenomena (Table 3.2).

The human who destroys nature

The soiled river

Eutrophication

Restoration actions

Industrialization innovations

Profusion in nature

Ecological modernization

Progress

Explanatory register of a prospective narrative

Elements related to an analogical ontology

Table 3.2. Other ontological dimensions of the motives instituted in water quality control policy in France since 1800

Past abundance

European territory

Highly migratory fish

Water purification

(Re)discovery of artificial fertilization

The living river

Identity

Explanatory register relating to a ritual, myth, code

Elements of a totemic ontology

French territory

Contributions, rearing, transactions

Accessibility of fishing for all

Trout

A necessary evil

Access to fish rivers

In exchange for pure rivers

Moral principle

Prohibition of poaching

Explanatory register relating to an exchange agreement

Fish mortality

Self-purification

Sacrificed river

Environmental motive established

Elements related to an animic ontology

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Thus, sacrificed river, fish mortality and trout motives relate to an animistic ontology in which a moral principle justifies an exchange agreement. The sacrifice of a few rivers is a necessary evil to allow industrialization and preserve in exchange pure rivers that are beneficial for the supply of drinking water. The legitimate relationship between man and fish is that of fish management, which involves membership of an association and participation in the fight against poaching. The trout motive extends this exchange relationship by democratizing it. Every fisherman is entitled to trout, and even polluters can contribute to the trading relationship through the criminal transaction. The trout motive also refers to the totemic ontology of the national territory, whose repopulation becomes a ritual. This totemic ontology is also found, although less clearly, in the motive of self-purification, which is a belief in the magical ability of water to purify. It is more because of this belief that the motive was instituted in France than because of its naturalistic characteristics. At the end of the sacrificed stretch, nature would digest this pollution. It is therefore understandable that the motive for eutrophication is perceived as totally foreign since it refers to an opposite myth, that of a vulnerable nature. There are few motives that unfold in the manner of an analog network, but the justification of the sacrificed river is implicitly part of a forwardlooking account of a desirable industrialization because it brings progress. We can also see in the extremely heterogeneous forms taken by actions to restore ecological continuity (fish passage, dam dismantling, truck transport) the proliferating character of an ecological modernization that will take place in the future. Allan Schnaiberg and his colleagues (2002) pointed out the disparate nature of ecological modernization, which is manifested in many initiatives but whose overall effect remains uncertain. Like the consistency of the motives, their ontological references are important but do not explain the observed changes in water policy. These characteristics facilitate or constrain the actors’ rhetoric and offer them more or less insight into reality. However, political work can compensate for the differences between the consistency of the motive and what it means.

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It can be observed that the interiority of totemic motives tends to align with pre-existing political territories (national or European) or idealized forms of nature (living river, dirty river). It can be assumed that there is a mutual reinforcement of motive and territory or the natural ideal in this case. We also see that the exchange agreement, which constitutes the explanatory register of animic motives, can be aligned with corporatist interests (urban authorities for the river sacrificed, fishermen for fish mortality and trout). The reference to a moral principle places these animic motives in a temporal permanence that can discourage any investigation. 3.2.3. Modalities for implementing the environmental motives of the water quality control in politics Diachronic monitoring of the motives associated with public policy instruments (Table 3.3) shows changes that are indicators of political mobilization and work. The exploration of these policy implications is particularly fruitful in the field of the environment when attention is paid to what public action makes visible and what it makes more difficult to discern. The six environmental motives we have followed in chronological order of appearance in French and European water quality control policy (sacrificed river, self-purification, fish mortality, trout, highly migratory species and eutrophication) reveal changes that an instrument approach could not have observed. The diachronic comparison of these motives and the instruments to which they have been associated thus shows a shift in the concerns that have dominated water policies in France, from the disposal of urban and industrial waste in the 19th Century to the treatment of discharges, including those of agricultural origin, and the ecological continuity of watercourses today. This transformation is not only cognitive, but also accompanied by instituted benchmarks that provide stakeholders with clues to control pollution, to impose stricter standards in threatened areas, to verify that structures that constitute obstacles allow a satisfactory flow for aquatic life to pass through and to monitor the status of fish populations. Over time, the motive of the sacrificed river, characteristic of a policy that is not very environmentally friendly, has disappeared. The environmental motives that have been established include more biodiversity.

Fish mortality

Self-purification

Authorization for pollutant discharge (decrees 1810 and 1852)

Sacrificed river

Prohibition (criminal sanction, law 1829)

Zoning (delimitation) of white water in the inventory of crossing devices carried out for the framework directive (2010 decree)

Authorization for urban waste in Germany

Public policy instrument with which it was associated (1st appearance in the regulations)

Environmental motive established

Visibility of this pollution

Politicization of accidental pollution as equivalent to poaching

White water visibility

Invisibility of other impacts

Visibility of the impact of cities

Invisibility of polluters’ responsibilities

Politicization of pollution as a “necessary evil”.

Political work observed

Setting up a reference point to control accidental pollution

Distinction of white water from other waters

Setting up a benchmark to monitor the impact of urban pollution

Loss of benchmarks for reporting pollution

Effect

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Eutrophication

Highly migratory

Trout

Setting up benchmarks to regulate works in rivers

Greening of livestock manure

Politicization of phosphate-free detergents

Greening laundry detergents Stricter standards for sewage treatment plants and agricultural spreading

Implementation of benchmarks to Ecologization of fishing as a pressure regulate fishing, rearing and impacts of on the species structures

Visibility of the mills

Ecologization of weirs and dams as obstacles to migration

Ecologization of dams as obstacles to migration

Disqualification from rearing and fish farming.

Establishment of fish management

Mitigation of the dissuasive nature of the sanction for accidental pollution

Table 3.3. Political use of the environmental motives of water policy

Vulnerable areas (1993) and sensitive areas (1994)

Population monitoring through COGEPOMI (2005)

Classification of rivers for the circulation of migratory fish (2006 law)

Zoning (classification) of watercourses to migratory (law 1984)

“1a”class for water quality monitoring (1971 inventory) Trout ecologization

Politicization of trout as a national heritage

Prohibition to fish in rivers without being a member of an AAPP (law 1941)

1st category zoning (1941 law)

Invisibility of offenses

Monetarization of fish repair

Criminal transaction (decree 1870)

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This transformation has not been uniformly oriented towards better integration of environmental considerations into public policy. Instead, the penal transaction and the compensation arrangements offered to accidental polluters were introduced with a view to tolerating pollution. In addition, other normative considerations have been incorporated into the motives and instruments adopted. Trout has been used to federate anglers nationally and then justify government intervention in fish management. Eutrophication has long been associated with foreign concerns. This comparison also shows that greening is a relatively recent mode of politicization (from the 1990s onwards) that simultaneously takes place on the national and European scenes. Ecologization highlights the natural role of “socionatures” and tends to mask human actions that artificially support fish populations. However, it also provokes opposition reactions that lead to the repoliticization of the existence of other “socionatures” (mills, viruses, etc.). The studied instrument and motive pairs do not allow us to see the political work of crystallization of a motive. The rise in singularity is based on an emotional register that has not been translated into the public policy instruments of water policy. This type of political commitment is easier to identify in interviews than in the stabilized instruments of public action. We will find more examples in the next section. The diachronic evolution of motives is interesting because it reveals changes that had not been seen with other tools. However, it cannot be ignored that the greening of the water quality control policy in France and Europe was due to other factors and that the political work on the motives only accompanied it. This indeterminacy can be overcome by comparing situations that are governed by the same institutions but which would differ on one or more environmental motives. This is the issue discussed in the next chapter.

4 Motives Under Discussion in Two Water Agencies

We saw in the previous chapter how water quality control in Europe has evolved over time. This has been possible thanks to studying the motives instituted in legislative and informative policy instruments. We now turn to motives that are still under discussion and do not have the same visibility in different regions, focusing on a sub-national level. In recent decades, water agencies in France have implemented financial and contractual policy instruments at water basin level, in order to improve water resource management. The study of two agencies reveals significant differences in policy instrument choices and implementation. Our hypothesis is that such differences are explained by specific political work on the motives associated with the policy instruments in both water basins. In the previous chapter, historical analyses and monitoring of stabilized motives have already revealed how they were used in political work. But it is not always possible from these sources to restore the indeterminacy of situations. For example, what future seemed most likely to the actors? What crisis were they trying to avoid? Did they face any dilemmas? Were they surprised? The decisions taken and the written reports show a situation more stable than was experienced. The ambiguous circumstances were interpreted in a particular way that erased the actors’ initial ambiguity and intentions. The comparison of the policies and discourses of two organizations subject to the same institutional rules in two different places restores part of this indeterminacy, and the political work of giving meaning to this uncertain reality.

Politicization of Ecological Issues: From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives, First Edition. Gabrielle Bouleau. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Motives are not only the result of political work, but also the substance of it, with which the actors tinker, search, question and try to give substance to a social and environmental reality. Then, when it takes shape, the scaffolding of its construction disappears and all the effort of holding a still, fragile building in place disappears also. By observing what has stabilized over time, we only have access to some of the political work that has been achieved. Just as the sociology of science and technology describes a “hot” science that is less stabilized than a “cold” science described by history (Latour 1997)1, we can observe political work that deals with “hot” motives that are not yet stabilized. To understand the art of playing politically with motives, it is necessary to reconstruct the configurations in which the actors were found. For example, Norbert Elias (1993) used this term to describe the interdependencies between individuals. These are relationships that not only act as external constraints, but also guide the way in which actors view the game and their roles through their commitments and distance. In this interpretation process, not all motives are present, visible and recognized. Political work brings out motives by assembling different elements of an amorphous reality, while eroding the consistency of other interpretations. Since the investigators are also sensitive to the motives they encounter, reconstructing indeterminacy requires a comparative method and empirical framework in order for the individuals to maintain distance from the motives involved (Box 4.1). We conducted this comparison based on the policies and discourses of two French water agencies, Rhône-Méditerranée and Corse (RMC) and Seine-Normandie (SN), to show that beyond their similarity to a common model considered corporatist and not very conducive to pro-environmental innovations (section 4.1), each organization has developed its own motives for restoring its intersectoral, more or less environmental margins for maneuver (section 4.2). The malleability of the environmental motives used includes the definition of their outlines, interiority and visibility (section 4.3).

1 “How could we be frozen by the cold breath of science, when it is hot and fragile, human and controversial, full of thinking reeds and subjects themselves populated by things?”, republication (1991). La Découverte/Poche, Paris.

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Investigating motives that are still malleable requires taking a break from those we encounter and remaining open to other interpretations of reality. This constraint is common to many social science surveys. It has been taken into account here by adapting the empirical framework and survey methodology. For our empirics, we chose to compare political work within two water agencies, Seine-Normandie and Rhône-Méditerranée and Corse, which do not give the same importance to ecology. This gave us the opportunity to observe the mobilization of different motives on similar situations. For our methodology, we favored the comprehensive semi-directive interview, to restore the interpretative plasticity of the configurations. “Only witnesses can raise issues and positions prior to the synthesis,” (Beltran 1999, p. 258). Interviewees were first invited to share their practices while taking their memories seriously, and then to solicit their reflexivity by being asked about their beliefs and opinions. In the first part of the interview “The interviewer’s work consists (…) of helping the respondent to say what they cannot say, to pass on part of what is in their ‘practical consciousness’ to their ‘discursive’ consciousness,” (Pinson and Sala Pala 2007, p. 586). It was indeed easier for the respondent to describe situations that are consistent with stabilized motives, but the interviewer also sought circumstances that challenged this coding, states of disorder (Lemieux 2012) which had to be articulated in other words. The second part of the interview involved the respondent in the interpretation in terms of motives, and made them react to other practices and interpretations. The survey proceeded by cross-checking sources with individuals in similar and distinct situations (triangulation) and stopped when new interviews confirmed the identified motives without revealing new ones (saturation). Agencies are low-hierarchical organizations, whose employees are mostly managers, but the few executive directors are nevertheless better able to impose their motives than their subordinates. The survey was conducted “from bottom to top” (Friedberg 1993, p. 92) to have in mind as many unstable and difficult to perceive motives as possible, before the interviews with the top of the organization. In this section, we relied on 36 interviews with the staff of the two water agencies, 28 interviews with stakeholders in an interdependent situation with these agencies and the observation of 10 internal collective meetings. This was a longterm survey conducted between 2004 and 2016. Box 4.1. Investigating “hot” motives

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4.1. The water agencies model Several countries have set up basin organizations to allocate water resources. These administrations operate according to different models that give more or fewer decision-making powers to water users vis-à-vis the State and that apply or do not apply a “polluter-pays” principle. Waterschappen in the Netherlands are subject to the rules of each province, but enjoy a high degree of subsidiarity in planning uses, managing water infrastructure projects and exercising water quality control on their territory. Inspired by this model, the water agencies in France are managed by a basin committee composed of representatives of the State, local authorities and users. They have a role in planning and financing water management, but do not exercise either project management or water quality control itself (Barraqué 2000). River basin management was introduced in France with the 1964 law that created six Basin Financial Agencies2 to collect fees and subsidize pollution control. Edith Brénac and Joseph Szarka approach water agencies from the perspective of sectoral neo-corporatism (Brénac 1988, Szarka 2000). Behind a façade of intersectorality, which suggests that basin committees are “water parliaments”, problems would be managed in a segmented way, so that some organizations retain a monopoly on defining the public policies that concern them. This theory and the arguments of institutional economics that have been opposed to it are based on general observations made on the entire French basin management system. From this debate emerges an ideal-typical figure of the water agencies that has rarely been put to the test in terms of its territorialization. This model and its criticisms will serve as a reference for comparison. Before specifying the nature of these debates, let us present in a simplified way the three main actors who govern the French agencies. These public administrative establishments are placed under the supervision of the ministry in charge of the environment, but their board of directors comes from a basin committee in which the State has a minority role. They therefore enjoy a certain degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the State administration, compared to other public institutions in which representatives of the central administration are in the majority. 2 The 1964 French law established “Agences financières de bassin” (AFB) which became “Agences de l’eau” (AE) with the 1992 Water Law. The terms water agencies and basin agencies will be used interchangeably here.

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The composition of the basin committees is determined by national decree. They are made up of leading figures appointed by the basin prefects: qualified persons and representatives of the State, local authorities and water users in the basin. These basin committees vote on the main orientations of the master plans for water development and management in each basin (SDAGE), and the intervention programs of each agency which set the usage fee rates and the operations eligible for subsidies. The agency itself, i.e. all its employees, implements the intervention program by charging water users and co-financing projects to improve water management. It is also the linchpin that writes the documents submitted to the basin committee. Its staff (500–700 staff) consists mainly of contract workers whose status is specific to agencies with little possibility of mobility outside these structures. This particularity is conducive to the development of a specific professional identity. But the agencies also employ – often in managerial positions – engineers from different Corps of the State who have a more diversified career. The budget of the six metropolitan3 agencies now represents just under two billion euros per year. In comparison, the Water Directorate, of the Ministry of the Environment, which supervises the agencies, and manages the freshwater quality control, has a budget 10 times lower. This department is the interlocutor for the European Commission, implementing water directives. In 2006, the reporting of water-related data to the European Union and part of the freshwater quality control were entrusted to a new public administrative establishment, ONEMA, which joined the French Biodiversity Agency (AFB) in 2016. Accounting rules and job creation in the agencies are the responsibility of the Ministry of the Environment, which clearly negotiates them with the Finance Ministry. Since 2006, the agencies’ budgets have also been submitted to Parliament for approval. This system is vulnerable to several corporatist sectoral logics (Lacroix and Zaccaï 2010, Szarka 2000). The most obvious one concerns agriculture whose policy is negotiated outside the agency system. The influence of agricultural corporatism on water policy is undeniable. Farmers have long avoided levy and pollution charges, benefiting from weak controls by government departments (Busca 2010, Bourblanc 2013, Brun 2004). It was 3 In addition to the six basins created in 1964, basins were also established in French Overseas Territories from 1992.

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finally the condition of aid under the common agricultural policy (2003) that imposed the installation of meters, declarations of irrigation volumes, and plans for the spreading of effluents and pesticides. The level of agricultural pollution charges is the responsibility of the legislator (environment code) who has set them low; only the charges for water abstraction are voted by the basin committees. The Cour des comptes (French audit court) estimates that during the seventh program (1997–2002), farmers received €439 million from the agencies to bring their livestock buildings up to standard, whereas in the same period they paid only €15.6 million in net fees for this purpose (Cour des comptes 2003). They now pay about 4% of the fees in the two agencies of the Rhône and Seine. In these basins, as in the rest of France, the agency system provides little incentive in the face of the Common Agricultural Policy (Busca 2010, Bourblanc 2013, Brun 2004). Farmers’ behavior towards non-point source pollution is little influenced by agencies. This pollution generates additional costs for drinking water services (water treatment, interconnection), which are borne by their consumers (Bosc and Doussan 2009, Roussary 2013). Agencies are also interpreted as a form of corporatism that manages a budget with relative discretion without promoting environmental performance (Lipietz 1998). This argument is more debated and pits the proponents of two economic instruments, the eco-tax and mutual assistance societies against each other. The eco-tax is based on the polluter pays principle, which encourages users to save water and pollute less. This principle was developed within welfare economics by economist Arthur Pigou (1920) and adapted to the water sector by Allen V. Kneese (1962). OECD popularized these ideas from the 1970s onwards (Pestre 2014). An eco-tax is effective if it is high enough to be a deterrent. In this model, the revenue from tax is very high in the early years and then decreases and the investments subsidized by the agency must be conditioned on their effectiveness in depolluting or saving resources. The idea of the Agences financières de bassin (basin financial agencies) was born at the Commissariat Général au Plan (general planning commission) and the economists who defended it put forward the eco-tax. But agencies are the result of a political compromise that keeps them away from this policy instrument. The model observed in practice is a more mutualist system that is inspired by associations of water users in Germany4, which save together to finance each year some depollution and water supply equipment for their 4 In the Netherlands (Waterschappen) or in the German Ruhr (Genossenschaften).

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members (Barraqué 1995). The general planning commission describes this principle as polluter-societarian (Commissariat Général au Plan 1997), where each member expects a “fair return” from their contribution. When the 1964 law was passed, the senators did not want the agencies to have too large a budget in the first few years. They required that the level of usage fees be 14 times lower than the estimated deterrent level and that they balance their expenses and revenues each year. All the agencies therefore opted for a mutualist operation at the beginning. Some managers (Martin 1988) kept the ambition to raise the level of fees as and when necessary to reach the deterrent level. Bernard Barraqué (1995) defends this mutualist model from a functionalist institutional economy perspective. His analysis is based on an international comparison of the problems posed by water management (shortage, pollution, cost of local infrastructure, technicality of the issues, etc.) and the institutions that respond to them in each country. The French situation is marked by republican liberalism and the economic fragility of municipalities. In a country that only recognizes private or public ownership (i.e. no commons), “the environmental aspects of the right to water were not enforced and rapid industrialization made the situation catastrophic” (Barraqué 1995, p. 441). The agencies would have made it possible to “break the deadlock by economic means” (p. 442) by financing the depollution that industrialists were slow to take charge of, which crumbled5 and economically fragile public water services could not support alone. With other authors (Calvo-Mendieta et al., 2014), he points out that agencies have become places where rules for the use of a common good can be developed. They cover half the cost of sub-basin participative planning, in systems such as river contracts or Schéma d’Aménagement et de Gestion des Eaux (SAGE) (Richard-Ferroudji 2008). Jean-Pierre Le Bourhis showed that this participative planning was more conducive to learning than the centralized management used in the United Kingdom (Le Bourhis 2003). In this perspective, the levies imposed by the Ministry of the Environment on the agencies since 2003 and the parliamentary control of the agencies’ budgets set up in 2006 both limit the financial autonomy and subsidiarity enjoyed by the basin committees.

5 31,000 public water and/or collective sanitation services. Data: SISPEA (Onema) – DDT(M), 2011 / Source: Panorama des services et de leur performance, Onema, 2014.

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Less visibly, industrial corporatism has segregated internal agency policy, which benefits from it at the expense of households. Small industries and businesses that use public networks to supply themselves with water and discharge their wastewater are in theory indebted to the agencies, but they are not necessarily identified as such6. They benefit from an infrastructure (drinking water supply and wastewater collection network) to which they contribute little. The agencies’ first two programs (1969–1976) were coupled with State aid contracted in the form of voluntary agreements per sector and they primarily benefitted manufactures not connected to the public network. As is the case for many environmental standards imposed on industrialists (Michel 2012, Garcier 2007, Lascoumes 1994), the content and phasing of these agreements have been dictated by industrial interests. The agencies subsidized only those expenses the industrialists agreed to incur and did so according to their schedule. Fees on metals were introduced after the spontaneous reduction in emissions (Meybeck et al., 2007). Chemistry was the most beneficial activity in the agency system (Brénac 1988). This industrial depollution was practically completed in 2000. The industrial share of fees and interventions has steadily decreased in agencies’ budgets since the 2000s (Barraqué 2003) and has been close to the agricultural share. Finally, with regard to domestic pollution, elected representatives of local authorities have reoriented basin management towards financing drinking water and sanitation networks. This diversion took place in several stages. In 1970–1971, the Association des maires de France encouraged its members to stop paying urban service charges and engage in a five-year conflict with the agencies (Evrard 2006). The mayors demanded that the inhabitants pay their charges directly and that the gross charge and the purification premium be separated. Since 1975, subscribers of the public water and sanitation service have been ratepayers of the agency, although they have few levers for action on the future of the pollution they generate and their charge is not modified according to what they discharge into the network. If the public network wastewater treatment plant is functioning well, it is the contracting authority who receives the agency’s wastewater

6 Normally, every industrial company must establish a spill agreement with the manager of the public water network and notify the public authorities. Often these industrialists invoke economic arguments with elected officials not to sign such agreements, which are therefore few in number.

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premium and is not obliged to pass it on to the local population (Evrard 2006, p. 120). As elected officials prefer to finance sewer networks rather than wastewater treatment plants, subscriber fees provide a collective savings fund that ensures the development and modernization of pipelines. Bernard Barraqué states that this modernization is necessary and would be poorly financed without the agencies (Barraqué 1995). But the management of these savings by the agencies has changed their raison d’être. Some of their charges do not have an incentive effect on the state of the water resource and depend only on the pipelines they possess. Alain Lipietz sees it as an annuity for the pipe industry (Lipietz 1998). This orientation biased in favor of equipment was then locked-in by decisions in favor of long networks, which increased the budget needed to modernize them. The promise of aid to finance collection networks encouraged the development of these infrastructures, particularly in sparsely populated areas where other modes of sanitation would have been more economical. However the pooling was highly favorable to the elected representatives and subscribers concerned. This was particularly the case in municipalities with less than 400 inhabitants whose population was exempt from charges until 20087, when their water services could receive aid from the agencies. The promoters of the eco-tax model imagined that the agencies would be transitional organizations that would disappear once collective facilities were built and the cost of individual facilities was internalized by users. At the current rate of replacement of pipelines, assuming that renewal is carried out uniformly throughout the network (which is not really the case), it would take about 140 years to renew drinking water pipes and 160 years for sanitation networks (Cador 2002). The management of the corresponding savings ensures that the agencies have some longevity and support from the water-related industrial sector. The act of entrusting management of these savings to the agencies also allows a certain economy of scale for the water sector. Local authorities only take on debt on the self-financing part of their networks. The interest on their debt that is passed on to the water price at the service level is therefore lower (Barraqué 1995). The elected officials responsible for wastewater networks see the domestic charge, the amount of which is decided at basin level, as a politically painless way of increasing the 7 With transitional provisions between 2008 and 2012 (Water and Aquatic Environments Act 2006).

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price of water to ensure the renewal and upgrading of the networks. The effect is homogeneous across a water basin and cannot be attributed to any one mayor. The basin committees easily voted to increase this fee, with consumer representatives being a very small minority. The consensual nature of the increase in subscriber charges in the basin committees has facilitated the State’s withdrawal from network financing. To take into account the massive investments required by the 1991 Urban Wastewater Directive, the agencies have introduced an agglomeration (or collection) rate applied only to domestic users, which has multiplied their charge by a factor of 1.5–3. As a result of all these developments, the agencies now have a budget mainly financed by domestic subscribers (more than 75%). This budget is mainly used to subsidize water, sewerage and wastewater treatment networks according to a mutualist approach. But the agencies are also invited to finance the restoration of aquatic environments. While this restoration aims to correct damage caused by all uses, most of its financial burden is borne by domestic water consumers, rather than industrialists or farmers. The research work mentioned above tends to essentialize the French model, without isolating “the national part” (Pollard and Prat 2012) from territorial action specific to the basin. Moreover, the study of constituted interests and technical lock-ins leads to a functionalist interpretation that underestimates the share of interpretation of actors in the political configuration of each water basin. Political science has hardly explored the territorial dimension of water basin management in France. This is probably related to the low conflict character of the territoriality of water resource management on the national scene, despite strong opposition to local dam projects. This peaceful situation contrasts with the situation in Spain, for example (Genieys and Valarié 2001). If urban water services are politicized as issues of intermunicipal competence (Hellier 2015) and departmental competence (Barbier 2015, Caillaud 2013, Grandgirard et al., 2009), the politicization of managing the resource and aquatic environments is less visible in the public space. Yet it is also a territorial issue in the sense of a “political space constructed socially and politically by reference to a specific problem” (Duran and Thoening 1996). Water is also a constitutive element of a common territorial good (Lascoumes and Le Bourhis 1998).

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This territorial issue of water resources and aquatic environments has been studied at departmental level through the prism of cross-regulation (Lascoumes 1994) or economies of scale (Grandgirard et al., 2009), and at the level of local water communities that support river contracts or water development and management schemes (Richard-Ferroudji 2008). In this work, the water agencies appear in the background as a funder without an autonomous political agenda. But this bureaucracy (Bouleau 2015) is not so politically neutral. Each agency has also developed its own institutional and environmental motives that give particular meaning to its territorial political configuration. 4.2. Two water agencies as reflected by their institutional and environmental motives Actors perceive their institutional and “socionatural” environment from “already existing” motives. But they can also act on these motives through political work. Among the various forms of political work on motives we identified, two of them are based on specific resources. Crystallization is indeed an aesthetic register that requires artistic skills, while ecologization draws on environmental knowledge. While there is creative talent and ecological knowledge within the agencies, they do not have a monopoly. For this reason, it is not possible to explain the differences in water financing policies in two basins by studying only the agency actors concerned. We must also explore the interface between these organizations, and artistic and scientific production. In terms of scientific research on large rivers, interdisciplinary environmental research programs (PIREN) funded by the CNRS8 and the Ministry of the Environment have been dedicated to large rivers and co-funded by the water agencies. The knowledge produced in this context has greatly guided agencies’ policies and it is therefore interesting to integrate it into the analysis of the motives mobilized. On the artistic production side, our work has focused on literary works, because their images and metaphors are taken up by water policy actors. The metropolitan territory was divided in 1964 into six major basins: Artois-Picardy, Seine-Normandie, Loire-Bretagne, Adour-Garonne, RhôneMéditerranée and Corse and Rhin-Meuse. We have chosen to compare here

8 Centre national de recherche scientifique (French National Scientific Research center).

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two rather influential policies, those of the agencies located in the two most populated basins and which have the largest budgets: Seine-Normandie and Rhône-Méditerranée and Corse. The first of the agencies’ programs was set up to deal with pollution defined by essentially chemical criteria (Bouleau et al., 2017). It was later, with the problem of eutrophication, that biology and ecology came to play a part in the agencies. Then in the 2000s, freshwater quality issues were redefined on a European scale with a new framework placing ecology at the heart of the assessment. The consideration of ecology has not followed the same path or the same temporality in the two agencies. Their comparison reveals a more prominent mutualist model in SN, an earlier consideration of eutrophication phenomena and a more ambitious ecological restoration policy in RMC. 4.2.1. Policy divisions between Seine-Normandie and RhôneMéditerranée and Corse The implementation of the 2000 European framework directive has reduced the differences observed from one agency to another in the importance given to ecology in terms of diagnosis, in the budget devoted to restoration actions, and in the facilitation efforts to support the emergence of such projects and their appropriation by the public. Despite these recent convergences, several indicators show that mutualist functioning towards local authorities has long been more marked in Seine-Normandie and still remains so to a certain extent, while the incentive functioning was introduced earlier and more strongly in Rhône-Méditerranée and Corse. In terms of financial criteria, since the two agencies do not have the same resources, SN having a budget almost twice as high9, it is necessary to reason in percentage terms. Mutualist operations are mainly manifested in the form of subsidies to local authorities. In the 1970s, manufacturers benefited from branch agreements to invest in treatment facilities and equipped themselves more quickly than local authorities did. From the 1980s onwards, the latter often invested first in wastewater collection facilities and then in pollution 9 Agence Seine-Normandie is the richest of the agencies with a budget that represents 45% of the total budget of all Agencies. Rhône-Méditerranée and Corse is in second place with 24% of this total budget.

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treatment facilities. The weight of the budget allocated to pipelines (sewerage networks and drinking water supply equipment) in aid of the two agencies has always been higher in SN (column A of Table 4.1). Even though we look only at the sanitation budget, the SN Agency spent more on collection facilities (which transport pollution) than on treatment facilities (which purify) until the 2000s (column B). This table also shows that the aid paid to wastewater treatment works according to their purification performance is higher at RMC (column C). These figures show a greater concern for the clean-up efficiency of RMC than SN. Mutualist model A: sanitation and drinking water networks/total budget

Incentives

B: sewage networks/community wastewater treatment facilities

C: aid for the proper functioning of water treatment plants/total budget

Program

SN

GCR

SN

GCR

SN

IV IV 1982–1986

GCR

34%

15%

170%

49%

3%

3%

V

1987–1991

39%

22%

124%

62%

2%

4%

VI

1992–1996

47%

24%

123%

50%

0%

1%

VII

1997–2002

46%

29%

148%

86%

0%

5%

VIII

2003–2006

35%

22%

65%

57%

3%

3%

XIX

2007–2012

32%

25%

53%

65%

5%

18%

Table 4.1. Indicators of mutualist model and incentives 10 in the two agencies SN and RMC

In terms of these infrastructures, SN grants higher subsidy rates, which tends to favor longer networks (the share of self-financing remaining to be paid by users is lower). RMC no longer finances networks in urban areas or wastewater treatment plants with more than 15,000 population equivalents that have not met the EU compliance deadlines. It makes its aid more dependent on environmental criteria and the polluter-pays principle (Lesage 2013).

10 Budgetary documents approved by Treasury (“jaunes”) for the years 1983, 1988, 1991, 1998, 1998, 2007, 2008 and 2014 (expenditure under Parts I, II and III). Data for previous years do not distinguish between networks and wastewater treatment plants.

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Moreover, the two agencies did not react to the problem of eutrophication at the same time. This phenomenon was first mentioned in the RMC Agency’s programming documents in 1981 and specific measures were taken. On the other hand, it only appeared in those of the Seine-Normandie agency in 1986. On this subject, RMC has funded a research program to develop a method for the rapid diagnosis of eutrophication in lakes that will remain an internal tool until the adoption of the European Water Framework Directive. Although the tool has been satisfactorily tested on the Seine (Bouleau et al., 2009), it has not been adopted in this basin on a routine basis. In addition, on the Seine between 1986 and the end of the 1990s, eutrophication was considered as a phenomenon only affecting rural areas, while the treatment of nitrogen and phosphorus in urban wastewater treatment plants on the Mediterranean coast began to be financed by RMC from the 1990s. The Seine-Normandie doctrine regarding phosphorus changed in the 2000s. The agency then considered that the main source of phosphorus was of urban origin. Finally, even though this represented only a small part of their budgets, the share of aid relating to the restoration of aquatic environments increased from 1 to 4% in the Seine basin between 1992 and 2012, whereas it was already 3% in 1992 in the Rhône basin and reached 7% in 201211. It can be noted that these two agencies have traditionally been managed by members of the Corps des Ponts (French environmental agency). When the agencies were created, the three major Corps of Engineers acted strategically to position themselves in these new organizations. The distribution of Agency Director posts would thus have been fiercely negotiated and the Corps des Ponts would have obtained “the Seine and the Rhône, which were the rivers where there were the most navigation problems and large cities” (LévyLambert 1964, pp. 58–59). We cannot therefore interpret the differences observed by differences in the training of directors. This monopoly of the Corps des Ponts in these two organizations has prevailed almost to the present day, with two notable exceptions of civil engineers from the private sector appointed in 1989 by Brice Lalonde in Seine-Normandie (PierreFrédéric Ténière-Buchot) and in 1994 by Michel Barnier in RhôneMéditerranée and Corse (Jean-Paul Chirouze). These directors of ecological 11 Budgetary documents approved by Treasury (“jaunes”, i.e. appendices to the draft finance bill) for the years 1983, 1988, 1991, 1998, 1998, 2007, 2008 and 2014 (expenditure under Parts I, II and III).

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sensitivity have left their mark on the two agencies, driving one of them towards a very mutualist policy and the other towards a more attentive approach to the effects on the environment. The independent variable that seems to have played a role is not corporatism, but rather its interruption in favor of politics. However, it remains to be understood how the ecological sensitivity of these two directors has produced such different results. Overall, this comparison shows that the RMC Agency is less mutualist. It makes its action more dependent on environmental benefits. It has been more proactive in addressing biological and ecological issues, and now invests a larger portion of its budget in ecological restoration issues. What interests us here is the motive that led RMC to identify part of its activity outside the mutualist system and symmetrically the motives put forward by SN to strengthen this system. The investigations and observations carried out in the two agencies reveal political practices that make certain motives more or less transparent and legitimate. We will argue that the budgetary constraint on the agencies’ cash flow is an institutional rule that successive directors have made very visible to SN, while many RMC agents are unaware of it. This motive legitimizes mutualist operation (4.2.2). In the Rhône basin, conflicts related to the appropriation of flows for hydropower have crystallized a river motive that gives a very concrete meaning to restoration actions (4.2.3). In the Seine basin, it is the treatment of pollution generated by the Paris agglomeration that has been the most contentious issue and has constituted the Paris basin as a motive for multiple exceptions (4.2.4). 4.2.2. Containment or generalization of the motive for cash flow constraint Public institutions are required to balance their budgets each year. This rule is identified as a constraint by all agents at SN, but much less so at RMC. By following the places where this rule is stated, we can identify the actors who are responsible for its visibility and strategies to make it visible to all or to confine its perception to a few dedicated services. All agencies are subject to a restriction on their cash surplus. It can be used as working capital to anticipate three months of average expenses, but not beyond. This rule is quite restrictive, because the agencies’

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intervention programs are established over five years and because the collection of annual fees is not regular from one month to the next. However, this rule is not perceived in the same way by the agencies. At SN, all the managers we met with mentioned the “cash constraint” and the resulting obligation to spend quickly. At RMC, this rule has no stabilized name and is not mentioned spontaneously in interviews. When asked about this subject, several officials consider it not to be a problem. This leads us to see this rule not as a given, but as a tradition whose consistency can be felt, more or less, depending on the configuration. This institutional rule is promoted by a public action management based on financial indicators. Philip Selznick’s classic study (1949) on the Tennessee Valley Authority illustrated very well the bureaucratic temptation of a donor to contract with the best organized and most effective actors to set up projects eligible for donor support. Research on the non-use of social assistance (Warin 2006) sheds light on the same reality as seen from the point of view of the population that ignores (voluntarily or not) a public mechanism. The water agencies are donors who are looking for projects that are eligible for their programs. The targets of this public action are project owners, only a small number of whom wish to undertake ecological projects. Many aquatic environments are not managed by a contracting authority and constitute what agency employees call “orphan water bodies”. Convincing public or private actors to organize themselves to “heal aquatic environments” (Richard-Ferroudji 2015) requires political leadership over several years that does not quickly translate into funded projects. At the same time, requests for subsidies for water-related infrastructure without “environmental gain12” are flowing in from the elected representatives of the basin committee. SN officials see this situation as a dilemma fueled by the fear that their budget will be taken from them by the Ministry of Finance. This threat first materialized in 2003 and has appeared regularly since 2006. In 2003, following 10 years of increases in the agencies’ working capital, the Ministry required them to contribute 210 million euros to a state fund unrelated to water quality13. This “levy” was made in proportion to the different basins’ budgets.

12 The expression is currently used by RMC agents “gain environnemental ”. 13 This budget was used to the tune of 135 million for ADEME, 59 million for flood control and 16 million for wetlands.

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The political work of the SN directors was reflected in the frequency with which they brought up the cash flow issue on the Board of Directors well before 2003. Few agendas did not include an item on the state of cash flow and politicization for potential new members, reminding them of the risk of the State taking a budget that the agency considered “dedicated to community networks”. Good cash management was equated with solidarity between the elected representatives of the basin. In all the arguments of the SN intervention programs, until the 2000s, basin solidarity was explicitly linked to the financing of networks. Strong advocates of the corporatist water model, such as former Premier Michel Rocard and former Chairman of the Loire-Bretagne Basin Committee Jean Launay, have described these “levies” as “hold-ups” (Rocard and Launay 2013). The former director of SN, Pierre-Frédéric Ténière-Buchot, expressed his “anguish” towards the “Bercy rackets”14. Internally, within the basin committee and the employees of the SN Agency, the cash flow constraint is politicized as a condition for respecting basin solidarity. With regard to the basin committee, successive SN directors have chosen to negotiate high fees with the communities. These are paid back to them according to a “fair return” principle in the form of equally high subsidies for all water-related projects, whether irrespective of the increase/ decrease they contributed to depollution, or not, or if they encouraged water consumption. This choice was made in the 1970s. Following the mayors’ protest against the payment of usage fees, the first director of Seine-Normandie, François Valiron, saw in it a way to enlarge the budget of his agency, in order to assert himself as an essential partner for elected officials and the State. The effect of investments on the environment seemed to him to be a second-rate problem. “Valiron (…) played this card to involve the agencies in as many actions as possible, including water distribution and wastewater collection. His speech [essentially said] you only have influence if you have money”15. 14 Interview with Pierre-Frédéric Ténière-Buchot, former director of the Seine-Normandie Agency, 2005. 15 2006 interview with Ivan Chéret, general rapporteur of the “water” commission of the Commissariat general au Plan and government rapporteur for the 1964 law.

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For this director, the management of collective savings schemes to finance pipelines was intended to become a mission of the agency in its own right. From a technical point of view, SN favored the diffusion of combine sewers, which allowed the calculation of average costs and facilitated the accounting optimization of these savings. However, this policy, justified by the principle of fair return, did not take into account precisely what each community received in relation to what these domestic subscribers paid. The assessment of fair return proved to be quite malleable. An annual accounting of the Paris metropolitan area’s charges was initially kept, then the agency gradually smoothed out this calculation over several years. For most communities, this balance was not calculated at all. “If you pay 100 in usage fees, you don’t get 100 in grants. The agency is a mutualist system. The comparison between usage fees and subsidies can be made but one must be careful, politically it can be explosive. It’s not stupid to be close to a ten-year fair return”16. In the 1990s, agencies were allowed to increase household charges to meet European regulatory obligations for urban wastewater treatment. But the requests for aid did not follow. Faced with the increase in cash flow, the SN directors convinced the basin committee to increase the rates of aid to the networks rather than lower the fees. All these decisions have contributed to making network financing a significant part of the SN agency’s activity. This doctrine was later justified by Ténière-Buchot, who saw in it a longterm ecological benefit on the consent of elected officials to invest in depollution, even though it meant putting pipes and wastewater treatment facilities on an equity basis (for several decades17): “By consuming a lot of the budget, I managed to introduce an over-regime of activity into morals to meet European standards, … to avoid being condemned”18.

16 Interview with a finance director, 2005. 17 The “pipes” share has tended to decrease in recent years in the SN budget (column B Table 4.1). 18 Interview with Pierre-Frédéric Ténière Buchot, 2006.

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The directors of the Rhône-Méditerranée and Corse Agency have defended the mutualist model less. When cash flow increased in the 1990s, the Board of Directors decided to propose to the Basin Committee to lower the fees. In the Rhodanian Agency’s intervention programs, basin solidarity for the financing of pipelines was not mentioned as such until the State withdrew its subsidies to the networks of rural municipalities and transferred this burden to the agencies in 2005. Since the 1990s, the RMC Agency has been encouraging short networks. Unlike his counterpart in SN, the director of RMC in 1994 did not interpret the increase in usage fees as a positive sign for the environment. Chirouze pleaded before the basin committee the need to increase the budget devoted to environmental studies and to prevent the deadweight effect of subsidies. Internally, SN is also working on a policy of generalization of cash flow constraints, which aims to make them clearly visible in all the organization’s departments. The agency’s Finance Directorate regularly asks all departments for their spending forecasts. When a financially significant project is delayed, managers in all departments are asked to identify projects that could be anticipated to offset the risk of increased cash flow. This repercussion of the problem on all services and its internal mediatization maintain the over-valuing of large projects. Admittedly, in the event of a blockage, these projects pose a major risk to cash flow, but they also constitute a currency for exchange between services and convey a form of recognition. When the agents in charge of restoring aquatic environments and territorial animation refer to the low proportion of the budget devoted to their problems, they often hear from their colleagues: “If you are given more, you will not be able to spend it”19. Jean-Baptiste Narcy describes this situation as a world where evidence takes the form of financial indicators and where consideration – what he calls economies of “worth” in reference to the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991) – is given to large projects and large-scale contributors (Narcy 2000, p. 233). This work of making cash constraint visible was more confined in RMC, at least until the end of the 2000s in the direction of interventions and basin actions, a service is dedicated to major industrial sites and large regional agglomerations. Programming “fast and strong” is the hallmark of this service. When a large project has to be deprogrammed or delayed, only this department is involved and manages the impact of this unforeseen event on 19 Interviews at the AESN, 2005.

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cash flow. Officers in other departments report internal pressure to “track” the large projects planned, so as not to delay payments, but this pressure is not associated with cash flow constraints. Nor is this rule politicized in relation to basin solidarity. The latter is clearly distinguished from a fair return. It is more understood as a means of compensating for disparities in resources between communities that are inversely proportional to their impact: “At the agency we mutualize. We collect the usage fees and redistribute them… The impact of the small commune in the hinterland of the Ain can be much greater on the small hydrographic basin into which it channels its waste than that of a large commune that channels waste into the Rhône. In addition, if communities had this money, perhaps they would not invest it in the environment”20. The budgetary rule that requires the agencies to balance their budgets each year without a cash surplus is thus perceived differently in the two agencies. Its visibility is generalized to all the services of the SN agency and associated with a logic of the honor of spending quickly to respect a contract for financing local authority infrastructure. It is confined to a department specializing in large projects at RMC. Other services can develop doctrines that result in slow projects of little financial importance, but more effective in terms of environmental gain. The cash constraint is an animistic institutional motive in SN, in the sense that it is associated with a moral principle (basin solidarity) and exchange agreements (fair return, equivalence between large projects). This rule has not been the subject of an investment that makes it so visible to RMC. In regard to RMC, it only makes sense for a department specializing in large projects, while in regard to the Seine all the departments in the organization chart are affected. This difference is the result of a political effort to generalize its visibility in the various SN services and its politicization in the agency’s board of directors, while there is more political work aimed at its containment and depoliticization (“it is not a problem”) at RMC.

20 Collective meeting with RMC response officers, 2005.

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4.2.3. The crystallization of the Rhône River motive The staff of the two agencies does not have the same perception of the river that drains the basin in which they operate. The Rhodanian identity has a meaning for RMC employees, which has no equivalent in SN. To refer to the Rhône and Seine, the staff of the agencies drew on a preexisting lexical repertoire. The adjective “rhodanien”, which means related to or belonging to the Rhône, is much more common than the adjective “sequanien”, which is its equivalent for the Seine21. The latter is mainly used by geologists to designate a specific sedimentary layer or by historians about a population of Gaul, although there are some expressions like “small fine rainfall, very sequanian22” or “sequanian landscape23” in literature. The respective frequency of these adjectives in the French language makes the motive for belonging to the Rhône Valley much more perceptible and understandable than the feeling of belonging to the Seine basin. Beyond the adjective Rhodanian, the Rhône River has been the subject of literary crystallizations at several points throughout history. It is the “river” of Provence that attracts the “child” in Henri Bosco’s 1945 novel set in the Camargue24. In 1952, at the time of the hydroelectric development downstream of Lyon, the director of the CNR, Gilbert Tournier, engineer and a literary man, exalted the modernity of the works by deifying the river in an essay entitled “Rhône: dieu conquis”25. As a counterpoint, the writer Bernard Clavel immortalized the practices of riverside residents who would no longer have access to it after the developments, in his novels “Les pirates du Rhône” of 1957 and “Le seigneur du fleuve” of 197226. These literary works that contrast a wild Rhône and a developed Rhône are regularly mentioned by researchers specializing in the Rhône and 21 A quick Google search in April 2017 returned 8,000 entries for sequanian compared to 458,000 entries for Rhodanian. 22 Arnoux, A. (1931). Carnet de route du Juif errant. Grasset, cited by the Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales, http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/séquanien. 23 Martin Du Gard, R. (1909). Devenir !, cited by the Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales, http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/séquanien. 24 Bosco, H. (2000). L’enfant et la rivière. Gallimard (1st edition 1945), Paris. 25 Tournier, G. (1952). Rhône: dieu conquis. Plon. 26 Clavel, B. (1972). Le Seigneur du fleuve. Robert Laffont; Clavel, B. (2003). Les pirates du Rhône, Pocket (1st edition 1957).

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employees within RMC to highlight the significance of the Rhône identity (Béthemont 1997) marked, even “traumatized”, by the development of dams and the catastrophic flooding of the river. On these occasions, the Rhône is often personified, an ancient iconography is reproduced and metaphors of past authors are quoted again, such as Jules Michelet’s “furious bull” (1840)27. These three processes (opposition, essentialization and personification) are found, for example, in the recent work of Jacques Bethemont and Jean-Paul Bravard “Pour saluer le Rhône” (2016) or in the film by the geographer Michel Raffin, president of the Alliance des Rhodaniens: “Le Rhône, ce taureau furieux” whose explanatory note presents it as “this river that founded a collective conscience”28. The Rhône is also singled out as an object of outstanding scientific interest due to the importance of its dynamics. In the 1980s, it was the subject of a “considerable cognitive investment by scientists at the University of Lyon” (Micoud 2015), on the occasion of the interdisciplinary program on the functioning of the river (PIREN Rhône). This work led to the concept of a hydrosystem (Amoros and Petts 1993), which covers transfers between upstream and downstream, between the river and the groundwater table and between the river and its lateral river annexes. These chemical, sedimentary and biological transfers justify, from a naturalistic point of view, a space of freedom left to the river so that the phenomena of erosion and sedimentation permanently recreate new ecological habitats. This greening is not only naturalistic, but also echoes ordinary perceptions and designations of the river, such as the lônes, which are the more or less flooded former arms of the river bed. For researchers on this program, the river is both an object of naturalistic study of great scientific ambition and a natural leisure space that is physically experienced: “I used to go there to practice my hobbies… the Rhône, for me, it was a multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary research subject that should have been taken long ago…. It is easier with a landing net and a pair of boots to do hydrobiology on small rivers than 27 “This Rhône, carried away like a bull that has seen red, gives against its Camargue delta, the Isle of Bulls and beautiful pastures” (p. 181) and “the terrible impetuosity of the Rhône, which falls like a bull escaped from the Alps, pierces a lake of eighteen places and flies to the sea, biting its banks” (p. 197), Michelet, J. (1840). Oeuvres. Histoire de France, Meline, Cans et Compagnie, Brussels. 28 Conference at the musée des confluences on 03/03/2015 at 18:30.

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to attack the Rhône. We had to be a little overconfident, we were unaware of what we were doing”. “I lived near the Rhone when I was a teenager. I swam in the Rhône for several kilometers. I used to go fishing… river dynamics… this idea met a demand for biodiversity conservation built by this dynamic… It is the idea of the wild, the pristine… There was a deep secular knowledge of fishermen, city dwellers and local residents. All that remained was to make it scientific… For these city dwellers, the wild is what moves, because it discourages any development… Access was difficult, it had to be earned. It was a freedom… created by the freedom of the river”29. This scientific investment was politically translated. The space of freedom became an anti-dam argument that was reused by expert activists in ecological struggles against the Loyettes dam (Michelot 1990) upstream of Lyon, then against the Bez dam, on the Drôme river basin (Lascoumes and Le Bourhis 1998, Allain 2002). These scientific ideas percolated within the agency through several channels. The department in charge of studies and planning recruited hydrobiologists and hydromorphologists trained by the University of Lyon. In 1992, the RMC Water Agency created a scientific committee that was chaired by Albert-Louis Roux, the PIREN’s scientific director. At the national and the European level, inter-agency discussions on the morphological quality of rivers were led by Paul Michelet and Pierre Balland, two RMC managers. In 2016, the RMC Basin Committee published a technical guide that translated the space of freedom into an area for the proper functioning of watercourses (Terrier and Stroffek 2016) in line with the notion of good state concept established by the European Water Framework Directive. In response to attempts to generalize the concepts associated with the Rhône motive (hydrosystem, space of freedom, ecological continuity, meandering, braided rivers) to the French territory, other motives were developed that reaffirmed the specificity of the Rhône. Several geographers have thus highlighted the specificities of the “low-energy rivers” of western France to argue in favor of a non-Rhodanian doctrine (Germaine et al., 2007). These “developed rivers” (Barraud 2009) were very early channeled 29 Interviews with PIREN Rhône researchers, 2006.

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to feed mills. As their river dynamics are very limited, the removal of crossriver structures would not result in a resumption of their meandering. The Rhône pattern is associated with high flow and ecological restoration means the return to this high flow when it has been disturbed by development. In the years 1990–2000, during the implementation of the 10-year plan for the restoration of the Rhône, political demand was expressed in concrete terms, for a “lively and current” Rhône. Carole Barthélémy and Yves Souchon (2009) noted that the elected representatives most motivated by this restoration were those who reported in their interviews a physical experience with the river, before the construction of the dams. For its part, RMC Agency staff perceives the Rhône on a daily basis. Since the late 1990s, the agency’s premises have been located on the banks of the river in Lyon. In addition to this visual relationship, some people have the physical experience of swimming in it, which was organized by the agency’s association. Several interviewees stressed their interest in ordinary perceptions of the river: “We regularly asked ourselves the question of the link between the perception of the ecologist scientist and the local resident. The elected representatives talk about the Rhône, but for them it is over there, behind the dam. It raises the question of appropriation”30. “The ‘societal’ approach is certainly more legitimate than a purely scientific approach. The latter must support this societal approach (in particular by highlighting long-term risks) but not replace it… It is even better if this progress in the reconquest of environments is accompanied by a real debate on the issues, constraints, limits …”31. The Rhône is an environmental motive that emerged before the creation of the agencies but which continued to be the subject of cognitive, sensory and political commitments after. This motive and the justification it provides for enhancing singularity is regularly mobilized by the actors who promote ecological restoration within the agency. Thus, in order to establish 30 Interview with a former director of the RMC Agency, 2005. 31 Interview with a Director of Studies and Planning, 2004.

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the first inventory required by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD), the officers of the RMC Planning Directorate opted for a process of aggregating local studies, which took them longer than their counterparts in other basins, who chose to work with models. They justify this choice by a specific attention to the local by affirming that “what is globally true can be locally false”. Their use of decentralized expertise was made possible by a good coverage of the basin by management structures (SAGE, Contrats de rivière), but this coverage was itself the result of a voluntarist policy in terms of accompanying these approaches. Thus, the lively and flowing Rhône River constitutes a naturalistic motive that politically justifies ecological conditions conducive to river dynamics and a mode of governance of the basin that gives way to the expression of local expertise and ordinary relations with the river. Regardless of any ecological causality, the Rhône is also perceived as a kind of totem pole, whose spatiality is a mosaic of sites linked by the hydrographic network (from the alpine small stream system to the Camargue delta), carrying an identity and a territorial unity whose legitimate spokespersons are those who experience emotions for this river. The origin of this identity is associated with the stages of development of the river after World War II, and their social oppositions downstream of Lyon, and then in the 1980s upstream. 4.2.4. The politicization of the Paris conurbation’s motive Compared to what is observed on the Rhône, the references to the physical properties of the Seine River by researchers and experts specializing in the basin are much less concrete, and often depreciated in relation to what would be its true consensual vocation, the city and trade. “The Seine begins to be a river after its confluence with the Oise. It is only called the Seine because its course was more popular for the tin route than the roads on its tributaries, which were dead ends. It was the river of exchange between people, between Italy and Northern Europe. It was never a big river; it was just a big route”32.

32 An expert from the Seine basin, 2005.

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While the Rhône has been the subject of attention celebrating its singularity, when the Seine is cited as an example, it is for its generic character: “… Nowhere else but in the Seine basin can students see so clearly the phenomena specific to all watersheds”33. These differences are reflected in the political work of the actors who are responsible for ecological issues within the SN Agency. Their understanding of the river is more abstract. The agency’s work on wetlands, for example, is presented in these terms by a project manager dedicated to restoration actions: “In the agency, some people believe that wetlands are like ecology. They are quite confused. But… the ecological reconquest of these areas is a promising issue for the quality of surface and groundwater… A functional typology has been established, a database has been created with researchers… The people who work on this theme are refreshing; they have a sense of the general interest”34. Because the Seine and its ecology are an abstract concept for the agency’s employees, basin experts have facilitated the appropriation of a mathematical model to program the investments necessary for the implementation of the WFD. Contrary to the arguments developed on the Rhône, SN employees welcomed the tool that made it possible to represent reality “on average” and to compare different options made commensurable by modeling35, particularly because it made it possible to break a political deadlock. The local authority that manages the treatment of effluent from the Paris metropolitan area is the Syndicat Interdépartemental d’Assainissement pour l’Agglomération Parisienne (SIAAP), whose population pays 40% of the pollution charges of the local authorities of the Agence Seine-Normandie. With a large territory, a willingness and capacity to finance investments each

33 A researcher from PIREN Seine, 2005. 34 SN Interview, 2005. 35 SN Interviews, 2010.

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year that do not require mutualization, SIAAP initially refused to join the agency system. To convince it to join the scheme, the agency’s officials would then have guaranteed it a fair return of these fees in the form of grants each year36. This initial agreement concluded for the benefit of SIAAP has become an asset for the SN Agency. While SIAAP could no longer threaten to leave a well-established system, this fair return was perpetuated because it offered the Agency a contracting authority motivated to spend 40% of the communities’ sanitation budget each year. However, this has made the agency quite supportive of SIAAP’s interests, which as a network owner has no direct interest in biological or ecological issues. SIAAP was thus able to negotiate to a certain extent with the agency and beyond with the French State its technical choices and the phasing of its investments. These negotiations focused, in particular, on the form that the agglomeration’s sanitation network should take and in particular, on the location of the various wastewater treatment plants. The dominant vision at SIAAP was inspired by the model initially designed by Eugène Belgrand in the 19th Century, i.e. a sewer system converging on spreading fields to the west, later replaced by the Achères wastewater treatment plant. For the proponents of this model, these spatial considerations also justified a type of public action: the Achères station was intended to extend to treat the entire agglomeration. Instead, SN Agency engineers and other minority engineers at SIAAP planned to distribute the clean-up effort to other stations to be built in the east, north and south of the capital. This would have shown a different form on a map of the agglomeration’s clean-up and would have motivated other types of investment. Until 1989, the westward polarized Belgrand motive prevailed. In 1989, in the face of opposition from the residents of Achères (in particular the inhabitants of Conflans, of which he had been mayor), Prime Minister Michel Rocard declared himself opposed to the extension of the Achères wastewater treatment plant. The SN Agency, which had just increased fees, was deprived of its main major project. For the dominant coalition in SIAAP, this refusal constituted a painful impasse. Belgrand the visionary was shaken on his pedestal. Achères alone lost its supremacy in perceptions. Other wastewater treatment plants planned by the agency and

36 SN Interviews, 2005.

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the dissident minority of SIAAP were gaining more visibility. The stumbling block situation in regard to Achères led the agency and SIAAP to rethink the urban sanitation scheme in a less centralized way. With the help of CNRS scientists, a PIREN program was created to rethink the pollution of the entire basin. These researchers developed a modeling tool that allowed the equivalence of different pollution control options (Bouleau 2014). Other wastewater treatment plants were then built under SIAAP project management, programmed and built all around Paris. This new multi-pole scheme became a reference image associated with programming, a spatial motive associated with reasons for action. SIAAP’s programming was again disrupted by the adoption of the 199137 European Urban Wastewater Directive, which required Member States to designate sensitive areas contributing to eutrophication where treatment plants would have to be more efficient to treat nitrogen and phosphorus. The SIAAP refused and announced its intention to invest only 10 years later in the processing of these nutrients. “This subject, for a long time, was very conflictual. SIAAP said: I will do what I can and at my own pace, Europe does not pay so I do not want to know the European rules”38. The agency and SIAAP then mobilized together to convince the French government to define a zoning excluding the Paris region, although most of the nitrogen and phosphorus flows in the basin come from it. This zoning has given rise to several disputes between the Commission and the French State. But from this common position of the agency and SIAAP came a new representation of the agglomeration’s sanitation and its place in the basin. The SN agency focused on the fight against eutrophication and the complementary treatment of nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater treatment plants in rural areas peripheral to the Paris agglomeration. Then when SIAAP finally planned its investments in nitrogen and phosphorus treatment, SN changed its doctrine again.

37 91/271/EEC of 21 May 1991. 38 Interview with a community relations manager at SN, 2005.

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These various mobilizations have constituted the Paris conurbation as an exceptional motive, to which is attributed a responsibility in the pollution of the basin, and therefore an environmental motive. A researcher from PIREN Seine thus testified to this Parisian motive in the basin that justified an exceptional treatment: “The silts of the Seine basin have accumulated, creating a particularly fertile area, favorable to agriculture, which has enabled the development of a city in its center. Paris is the first city of Christianity, since the 13th Century. It is one of the largest megacities in the world. It’s the city with a big C with agriculture around it with a big A”39. The motive of the Paris conurbation is often captured according to a naturalistic ontology that links its ecological impact to the history of its sanitation scheme, initially designed in a westward polarized way, during the time of the engineer Belgrand and Baron d’Haussmann, and transformed in a multi-polar way by the oppositions to the expansion of the Achères wastewater treatment plant. However, it can also be seen as a totemic motive justifying an exceptional status for the central zone of the basin and more broadly for the whole basin organized around this political capital. The spatiality of the Parisian motive is concentric. Its outline is not stabilized; it can be reduced to the Paris conurbation, but can also be extended to the mouth of the Seine as in the 1994 decree on sensitive areas. The presence of SIAAP and its importance comes to justify the importance of the motive of cash flow and fair return over the entire SN basin. 4.3. Use of motives in political work in both agencies It was not easy when the water agencies were created by the 1964 law to impose river basins as legitimate territories for public action among elected representatives of local authorities who were spokespersons for other territories. This political work was carried out by mobilizing motives whose outlines and interiority (Table 4.2), as well as visibility (Table 4.3), were negotiated.

39 A researcher from PIREN Seine, 2005.

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Physical properties

Animic motive

(very varied)

Cash flow constraint

Interiority

Explanatory register

Moral principle

Relationships, citizenship

Solidarity of the basin

Links between elected officials in the basin

Fair return

territorial

indivisible

identity

Rhodanian identity

Associated with a high energy river

Collective conscience

Birthplace of a civilization

Temporality

Exchange and reciprocal obligation agreement

Totemic motives

Parisian conurbation (to a lesser extent)

Spatiality

Associated with the exceptional character of the Capital

founding act

rituals, codes

Physical Basin perceived engagement Before or as a mosaic of with the river, hydrographically after the dams literary related sites quotations, …

Basin under concentric influences

From Belgrand, since the creation of the agency, since the Achères conflict

Table 4.2. Consistency of the non-naturalistic motives mobilized in the political work of the two agencies

The political process of motive negotiation affects the consistency of these motives (Table 4.2), which is more malleable than that of the “cold” motives studied in the previous section. For the animistic motive of cash flow constraint, the grain used to calculate fair return is rather fuzzy. For the totemic motive of Rhodanian identity, its physical properties are not clearly established, only the narrative and rituals (such as swimming through it) count. But the motive is also perceived in a naturalistic way when associated

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with the dynamics of the lively and flowing river, which is a source of intense experience. The Parisian agglomeration is more often captured in a naturalistic than totemic way. Nevertheless, the reference to the capital and its concentric area of influence to justify an exceptional regime is based on a motive that can be described as totemic. The outlines of this pattern are sometimes narrowly defined and sometimes broadened. Its temporality refers to multiple rather than singular events. Even the articulation of this motive with instruments of public action, such as zoning, does not necessarily stabilize its outlines because this zoning has been revised several times. Perceptions are different according to the actors interviewed. However, this does not prevent a certain political effectiveness in mobilizing these motives. Laurent Mermet and Geneviève Barnaud had already noted this “fuzzy effectiveness” in their study of the characterization of wetlands under political pressure. They did so by comparing the delimitation of these areas in the United States and France (Mermet and Barnaud 1997). They had noted that in the United States debates had focused on specific criteria, each of which fed into very lengthy expert debates, while France initially opted for categories with unclear boundaries but a strong territorial identity whose wet nature is not much disputed, such as “Les Dombes” or “Le Marais Poitevin”. Their analysis can be interpreted again by saying that France has mobilized totemic wetland motives, while in the United States experts have approached these motives in a naturalistic way that has given more space to criticism. Motive

Cash flow constraint

Mode of operation

Political work

Containment of its visibility (RMC)

Invisibility of the motive outside the service of industrial sites and major urban areas

Distinction between “fair return” and basin solidarity (RMC)

Depoliticization of the motive

Generalization of its visibility (SN)

Visibility of the motive and “large projects” throughout the agency

Equivalence of large projects (SN) Alignment of the motive with the interests of the basin’s elected representatives (SN)

Politicization of the motive as a risk of “hold up”.

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Quotation of literary works about the wild and developed Rhône, reproduction of ancient iconographies and metaphors Mobilization of emotions (swimming across the river, film projection) Rhodanian identity

Resistance to making local situations equivalent Essentialization and imputation of this identity to the energy of the river and its hydromorphology Distinction of low-energy rivers as “non-Rhodanian”.

Parisian conurbation

Crystallization of the motive “river founder of a collective consciousness”

Politicization of local ecological expertise as means of making public action appropriate

Ecologization of the “space of freedom” motive (PIREN Rhône)

Equivalence of local contributions to pollution through modeling

Greening of the Parisian motive by its impact on water pollution (PIREN Seine)

Making Achères equivalent to other sites

Visibility of other clean-up options

Distinction and essentialization of the SIAAP territory

Politicization of eutrophication zoning

Table 4.3. Political work on institutional and environmental motives in both agencies

Despite their vague outlines, these motives are widely used politically and explain the differences observed in the policies of the two agencies (Table 4.3). The motive for cash constraint has been politicized and made visible to SN by its generalization and alignment with the interests of the elected representatives of the basin by invoking solidarity and fair return. While at RMC, this motive has been made less visible. It was confined to a dedicated department. Basin solidarity has been aligned with other values, such as ecological considerations (environmental performance) and well distinguished from fair return. This contrasting political work has helped to establish a more mutualist operation at SN than at RMC.

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The Rhodanian identity motive explains a particular form of greening practices within the RMC agency, which focuses on river dynamics and its beneficial effects on biological processes. This motive is an idea that has taken shape, involving the remobilization of a literary, iconographic and event heritage celebrating the opposition between the energy of the river and its control by humanity. The local and physical relationship with the river is politicized as a guarantee of legitimacy of expertise and a condition for appropriate public action. In the SN basin, the delay in the implementation of European directives can be explained without recourse to motives, by studying the balance of power between the Paris conurbation and the actors involved in ecological rationality. However, the motive approach makes it possible to observe the greening of this agglomeration. To overcome the political impasse linked to the blocking of the extension of the Achères wastewater treatment plant, the agglomeration ecological impact was quantified, making it commensurable with other areas conducive to the establishment of a wastewater treatment plant, which have thus been made clearly visible. This process has encouraged a rise in generality, rather than an enhancement of the uniqueness of local biological forms. With these two case studies, we observe that the visibility of environmental singularities often comes up against the accounting and economic logic that favors equivalence independent of space. This opposition between economic rationality and ecological rationality is at the heart of the theory of ecological modernization, which considers that the empowerment of ecological rationality is the social change that will stop environmental degradation. This theory, which we will examine to what extent such social facts relate to institutional and environmental motives.

5 Motives for Anticipating the Ecological Crisis

What are the notable political debates which are sowing the seeds for the future in our current environment? In terms of ecology, the debates are focused on the crisis that threatens both climate and biodiversity and that in the short term could profoundly affect our lifestyles, either through its effects or through the changes needed to avoid these effects. Although it can be perceived in very current tangible forms (storms, heat waves, pollution) and in reference to the past (collapse of insect populations, retreat of glaciers, etc.), an ecological crisis takes on its political significance in the future. It is because it could lead to a disaster that it calls for public decision. When they deal with this issue, political actors often adopt a discourse focused on transition (Larrère et al., 2016). However, the meaning, speed and purpose of this transition are often ambiguous. The academic journals that are interested in this subject constitute several intellectual forums aimed at defining this crisis and qualifying the necessary transition. Through their debates, they feed into the positions of political actors. The study of these forums is justified because “experts and actors in policy networks are rarely in a position to fully control the production of the intellectual resources they manipulate in collective bargaining” (Jobert 1995, p. 20). In negotiating arenas, already proven arguments are more robust resources than those that are being brought into the debate for the first time. It is therefore more on an intellectual level that we can observe the emergence of new environmental forms and motives that qualify the crisis or its remedies. We are therefore interested here in forums where actors debate

Politicization of Ecological Issues: From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives, First Edition. Gabrielle Bouleau. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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political choices in the face of ecological crisis without a decision-making mandate. If the subject of ecological crisis is new to political science and political philosophy in France (Sinaï 2013, Beau and Larrère 2018), it is older in Anglophone and German-speaking academic literature where it brings together the theory of ecological modernization with several opposing conceptualizations. Ecological modernization is a theory of social change that has greatly influenced environmental policies in Europe. We approach this theory as a starting point, and will closely map the criticisms that ecological modernization has aroused and the responses provided by its promoters. The notion of an environmental motive provides a key to qualifying what these theories make perceptible and what they do not see. We will first study the environmental motives that are particularly meaningful in each theory, and then study how they conflict with each other over a controversial motive, the Anthropocene. 5.1. The theory of ecological modernization and its motives The theory of ecological modernization is a “current of macrosociological analysis of social change” that studies “specifically the processes of environmental improvement” (Boudes 2017). It is a current well established in Germany and the Netherlands that is also fueled by English, Canadian and American reflections but relatively unknown in France, with the exception of the analysis made by Philippe Boudes (2017) and Florence Rudolf (2007). This theory focuses on the conditions that lead to a social and institutional transformation in which ecological rationality is differentiated, and acquires more autonomy and legitimacy, particularly with regard to economic rationality, without calling capitalism into question. This modernization would take the form of the voluntary adoption of more environmentally friendly practices by both consumers and producers and the standardization of these practices in regulations. In what Florence Rudolf calls the “massive reality of everyday life”, this modernization takes the form of selective waste collection, energy-efficient practices, waste composting, soft modes of transport, recycling and the reduction of pollutants at source. Thanks to specific observation tools, sociologists can also reveal a more “discreet” reality, the empowerment of ecological rationality which becomes a new motive.

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Ecological modernization can thus be captured by its environmental forms and motives. Bicycles, sorting bins, individual composters and lowenergy light bulbs are all forms that are part of our living space and are legitimized by standards. However, modernization itself is a more abstract category than an environmental form. It does not have a well-defined spatial and temporal outline. It is presented as a set of stabilized discursive elements that encourage certain actors to adopt more ecological behaviors. It is a future-oriented institution, an ongoing process as suggested by its suffix “ization”, whose horizon is the advent of ecological modernity. Its effectiveness depends on the networking of actors and the dissemination of new practices. According to the typology proposed by Virginie Tournay, individuals who recognize signs of the presence of ecological modernization reconstitute it according to an analogical relationship. Ecological modernization was initially theorized by two German authors, Joseph Huber and Martin Jänicke. Sharing the environmental movement’s concern for environmental degradation but not its questioning of the capitalist mode of production, economist Joseph Huber (cited by Mol 1995) imagined a transformation of industry that would make it possible to respect the great biogeochemical cycles to which he attaches intrinsic value. At the same time, the politician Martin Jänicke (1985) became interested in environmental public action. He made a harsh judgment about state bureaucracies: too centralized, they would have favored curative solutions that were not very effective. This led him to advocate for the joint modernization of the State, civil society and the economic system by affirming that environmental policies must be industrial policies. Jänicke defended a precautionary principle so that decisions to avoid irreversible damage must be taken before scientific certainty is available. His ideas thus run counter to the doctrine that tolerates decision-making only on the basis of evidence-based policy. While there are several ways to justify the precautionary principle, Jänicke defends it because environmental causalities are complex and scientifically poorly controlled and the challenge is to avoid undermining future development potential. The “theory” of ecological modernization was then developed in environmental sociology as a theory of social change in favor of the environment. Because of its anchoring in sociology, ecological modernization is different from the green economy, but there are cognitive affinities between these two currents. The green economy was developed by David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Edward Barbier (1989) as a practical proposal for

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applying sustainable development in the United Kingdom and then formed the basis of the OECD’s environmental protection doctrine. The aim of green economy is to ensure that the environment counts in the economy, which is not the ecological modernization agenda, but rather to empower the ecology from its dependence on the economy (Mol 1995, pp. 31–32). For “natural capital” to be an economic issue recognized at its true value, the green economy also advocates the use of physical environmental accounting (materiality) and the consideration of radical uncertainty. However, Pearce and his colleagues highlight tools that are far removed from the sociological theory of ecological modernization, such as cost–benefit analyses, the polluter-pays principle, public investment and corrective taxation (Boisvert and Foyer 2015, pp. 143–144). Although the two trends deserve to be distinguished, the growth promises of the green economy are often an argument for promoting ecological modernization. However, this alignment strategy has its limits given the opposition front that the green economy has encountered from ecologists, workers’ organizations and countries of the South during the Rio+20 conference (Boisvert and Foyer 2015, pp. 155–158). The environmental and institutional motives for ecological modernization and the green economy are compared in Table 5.1. Ecological modernization was merely a pattern that the sociology of the environment sought to perceive. It has become in the political sphere a narrative of the advent of ecological modernization. A political narrative is a narrative of events organized sequentially to suggest causalities and serve as an argument for a political decision (Stone 1989, Radaelli 1999, Roe 1994). This belief has percolated into supranational economic and environmental institutions (OECD, World Bank, UNEP, etc.). In the 1990s, ecological modernization became a legitimate political narrative when a World Bank report was published (World Bank 1992). This report responded to concerns about the limits of growth (Meadows et al., 1972) and recommended a less centralized and more united development (WCED 1987). The World Development Report popularized the idea already put forward by other authors (Inglehart 1971) that ecological awareness would be the result of a certain material ease. Environmental concern would lead to the adoption of the first regulations in developed countries (ministries of the environment, impact studies, etc.). However, as this account admits, the results of these early state policies would be disappointing. There should be curative rather than preventive actions. The regulatory capture by corporatist interest groups is said to have been at the expense of innovation. The general quality of the environment has reportedly continued to deteriorate (Weale 1992).

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This failure would also be the failure of radical criticism that could not lead to effective environmental reforms. The rest of the story recounts how ecologists themselves abandoned the radical criticism of development in which they assimilated capitalism and industrialization for a less dogmatic posture, more distrustful of states and ultimately better able to convince industrialists to reform themselves from within (Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000). From activists, they have become experts (Mol 2000). By studying the mutual transformation of the roles and interests of producers and consumers, Mol thus concludes that Huber and Jänicke’s ideas have been adopted by consensus in the most developed countries (Mol 1995). The moral of this story is that the market is a vehicle for environmental change through consumers and standardization (Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000). Green economy

Institutional motives

Environmental motives

“Weak” “Reflexive” ecological ecological modernization modernization

Environmental sociology of networks and flows

Promotion of cost–benefit analysis, the Disqualification of curative state policies polluter-pays principle, Promotion of the precautionary principle public Promotion of ecological rationality investment and corrective taxation Promotion of physical Promotion of environmental accounting. information on Promotion of material flows for Promise of green growth. social greening movements as Disqualification of radical driving forces environmentalist criticism, for greening Market promotion, a driver of environmental change Promotion of science-based limit values Natural resources with predictable spatial and temporal boundaries Green tax Satellites, zoning or ecowatches, Bicycle paths, waste sorting, labeled environmental low-energy appliances, etc. production monitoring areas sensors

Table 5.1. Comparison of the institutional and environmental motives for the green economy and the different versions of ecological modernization

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After 1995, under the influence of Ulrich Beck’s work on reflective modernity, these same authors and others qualified this first version of ecological modernization as “weak” (Christoff 1996) and “technocorporatist” (Hajer 1995), and developed a more “strong” version (Christoff 1996), less deterministic, less technological and giving more weight to social movements (Toke 2011) in the reform process. Science would still be more necessary than ever to define limit values (Hajer 1995, pp. 99–103) but would no longer be sufficient to decide. Citizen mobilization would be crucial to promote a development that is decoupled from the consumption of natural resources. However, this second version is not stabilized. The separation between weak and strong ecological modernization is a political demarcation work that varies according to the authors. The close relationship between weak ecological modernization and the green economy leads many observers to consider that the economicization of biodiversity, in the Rio+20 process and within the Millennium ecosystem assessment, which has popularized the notion of ecosystem services is part of ecological modernization (Béal 2016). The latest version of ecological modernization seeks to better understand the regulation of material flows and political mobilization at the global level (Gille 2006). Very optimistic about the production and dissemination of environmental information and regulatory capacities by networks of globalized actors, this new approach is described by Arthur Mol as the environmental sociology of networks and flows (Mol 2008). In his theoretical approach to discourses, Maarten Hajer argues that Germany adopted measures to limit sulfur emissions at an early stage because of the importance of the political narrative of ecological modernization (Hajer 2006, pp. 65–74). This narrative is based on several rhetorical principles. It is part of a modernist heritage that places the most industrialized countries at the forefront of progress. It uses the organicist metaphor to generalize the toxic effects of pollution on individuals to the entire planet, as if it were the same phenomenon on a larger scale: entire life would be threatened beyond certain thresholds of disturbance. The reference to thresholds also stems from a certain confinement (Hajer 1995, p. 65) in the way ecological modernization mobilizes ecology and economics, by referring to paradigms that are no longer dominant in these disciplines: the stability of ecological systems

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(Bouleau and Pont 2015), the conditions under which economic trajectories shift towards more sustainable development (Stern 2004). However, this way of thinking has persisted in pollution control policies and is reflected in the action models promoted by the OECD and the European Environment Agency (Svarstad et al., 2008, OECD, 1994). In this conceptualization of the environment, there is little room for the unpredictability of life. Arthur Mol makes it clear that ecological modernization is concerned with “sustenance base” nature to the detriment of everything else that he disqualifies under the term “intuitive nature” (Mol 1996, p. 315). Finally, it should be noted that ecological modernization refers to an unfinished process: “The environment is slowly becoming institutionalized in the economic field1” (Mol 2002, p. 104). It is therefore not refutable. It refers to sociologists’ subjectivity since it is their responsibility to identify (or not) this discreet reality that is the greening of the social and economy, knowing that this identification contributes to its visibility and therefore to its dissemination. Showing others a form of ecological modernization leads to an autonomous ecological rationality in interpreting reality and thus contributes to this empowerment. Finally, ecological modernization is a narrative and/or argumentative motive without materiality, which describes or explains the proliferation of ecological practices that can be qualified as environmental motives because of their materiality. Florence Rudolf (1998) analyzed the qualification of what are referred to here as the environmental forms and motives for ecological modernization (cycle paths, waste disposal facilities, energy-efficient appliances) as a social construction of reality that brings about the expected modernization. She showed that at the end of the 1990s, the recognition and promotion of these motives was much more widespread in Germany than in France. Such recognition is not only a question of the qualification of motives by people convinced by ecological modernization, but also a matter of their material perception, which provides tangible evidence on which the discourse is based. Indeed, the physical distribution of equipment presented as ecological modifies the living environment of people who encounter these “socionatures” which carry ecological norms more frequently.

1 “The environment is slowly becoming institutionalized in the economic domain” (Mol 2002, author’s translation).

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However, the environment can also be interpreted through other environmental and institutional motives. Other theories oppose ecological modernization and offer alternative frameworks. 5.2. The forum for political ideas on the ecological crisis The political project of ecological modernization and its desirability for society as a whole is discussed in an essentially English-speaking academic forum within blogs2 and social science journals often specialized in environmental issues: Environmental Politics, Global Environmental Politics, Geoforum, Antipode, Environment and Planning A and C and Society and Natural Resources. Some traces of it can be found in French in articles in Natures, Sciences, Sociétés and more occasionally in Problèmes politiques et sociaux and critique internationale (Leroy 2005, Jänicke 2008a, Mormont 2013, Dahan 2014, Bérard 2015, Cabane 2015). The intellectuals who participate in these debates share the ambition to report on the evolution of the world with a grand narrative and make a common observation of an environmental crisis that calls for change. On the other hand, the forum is much less consensual with regard to the relationship between this environmental crisis and the capitalist economy. To describe the dynamics of this forum in a metaphoric way, we can consider that there is a nucleus constituted by the authors who feed the theoretical concept of ecological modernization by modifying it according to criticisms. Around this nucleus gravitate authors who use arguments of ecological modernization or the story of its advent without directly contributing to its redefinition. Then, at a distance from this nucleus and its electrons, three magnetic poles carry criticisms and alternative visions on the meaning of the environmental crisis and its political solutions. Each pole establishes more or less dialogue with the nucleus that updates its story. Poles and the nucleus are animated by communities that have different interpretations of the world. They do not pay attention to the same environmental phenomena. They do not see the same institutions at the root of the crisis, nor those that would allow them to emerge from it. It is therefore possible to analyze these policy proposals in

2 Dave Toke’s green energy blog http://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.fr/; http:// environmentalist onamission.blogspot.fr/; http://environmentalistonamission.blogspot.fr/.

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the light of the institutional and environmental motives they make visible, as proposed below. Then, we will discuss the dynamics of these proposals, which influence each other. 5.2.1. Mapping of the intellectual forum in sociology and political science on the ecological crisis The “nucleus” of the forum is led by environmental sociologists from Germany and the Netherlands and Frederick Buttel, Professor of Rural and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Martin Jänicke, Arthur P.J. Mol and Geert Spaargaren are regular contributors to the “theory of ecological modernization” (Jänicke 2008b, Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000). Around this “nucleus” are comparative politicians (Weale 1992, Pridham and Cini 1994, Hajer 1995, Andersen and Liefferink 1997, Liefferink and Andersen 1998, Jordan and Lenschow 2000, Van Tatenhove et al., 2000, Weale et al., 2000) who study environmental reforms in different countries by referring to ecological modernization standards and algorithms as a scale for measuring change and its values as an explanatory cultural variable. Thus, Germany’s energy choices and its readiness to regulate sulfur emissions are explained by the commitment of its decision-makers to ecological modernization (Hajer 1995, Aykut 2012). In Quebec, senior business leaders are said to be converted to this theory (Gendron 2006). More recently, the Grenelle de l’environnement in France3 has been analyzed as one of the signs of a conversion to political modernization (Whiteside et al., 2010, Béal 2016). These authors present the northern European countries as the most advanced (leaders) in terms of environmental protection while the southern countries are considered laggards.

3 Initiated under Sarkozy’s presidency, this process was called “Grenelle” in reference to the name of the Grenelle agreements signed in May 1968 with social partners. The Grenelle de l’environnement concluded an agreement between the government, trade unions and employers’ organizations, nature protection associations and local authorities in 2008 on a new ecological ambition that was reflected in two laws of the same name.

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Given the proximity of their titles, it is important to distinguish the theory of ecological modernization from the “ecomodernist” pole embodied by the Breakthrough Institute4. In 2015, this think tank published an “ecomodernist manifesto” which presents itself as an optimistic technophile scenario co-authored by 19 authors, 11 of whom work or have worked at the Breakthrough Institute. This manifesto is part of a modern tradition that opposes humans and nature, the latter being at the service of the former. The authors believe that there are no intrinsic ecological limits for all people becoming prosperous enough to live healthy, free and creative lives. Limits to prosperity would only depend on technological progress. Nor would there be any link between environmental impacts and the market economy. A decoupling between economic growth and resource consumption would be possible. The manifesto proposes a massive use of low-carbon energies, including nuclear energy and biotechnology, and a division of space, with dense urban areas and intensive agriculture on the one side, and protected areas, on the other. The modalities for defining which land should be spared are left open without specifying the political conditions or the role left to the market. Researchers in this pole do not publish in academic journals discussing ecological modernization, but rather in journals in ecology (Conservation Biology, Biological Conservation, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Bioscience, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, etc.) and energy policy (Energy Policy, Energy Economics, The Energy Journal, etc.). The other contributors to the forum consider this pole as a misguided version of ecological modernization and seek to stand out from it. The forum is also influenced by a “sustainable development” pole that perceives ecological modernization as insufficiently inclusive (Langhelle, 2000) and not reflective of its results. The authors of these ideas constitute a poorly structured pole, because they publish separately and quote little from each other. Andrew Jordan (2010) sees the advent of an ambitious environmental policy as a process of decompartmentalization. Karin Bäckstrand (2011) points to the lack of consideration of non-scientific knowledge in ecological modernization. Andy Scerri and Meg Holden (2014) point out the lack of consideration for ecological modernization for the most disadvantaged populations. Susan Baker (2007) accuses the European institutions of using ecological modernization in a purely symbolic way to build a positive image of Europe without reflexivity about the results 4 The Breakthrough Institute was created in 2003 by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2004).

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of their policies. These criticisms made in the name of sustainability are rarely echoed by the authors of ecological modernization, who are more interested in responding to ecosocialists. The third “ecosocialist” pole is embodied by authors who attempt to converge Marxist thought and political ecology (Foster 2005, Pepper 1998, Foster 2000, Benton 1989, O’Connor 1988). These two movements would have “a common enemy – capitalism – the underlying cause of social injustice and ecological degradation”5. Antipode is a forum dedicated to this pole, but its members also publish in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Organization & Environment, Environmental Politics and Geoforum. They teach or have taught in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States in faculties of environmental sociology (John Bellamy Foster, Eugene A. Rosa, David Pepper, Allan Schnaiberg), political science (Rosalind Warner) or human geography (Emily Yeh). They are also sensitive to issues of environmental justice. They believe that the theory of ecological modernization is a Trojan horse of capitalism (Foster et al., 2010). From this perspective, major development projects that aim to encourage mass consumption (large dams, airports, pipelines, etc.) are forms to be avoided. The ecosocialist pole supports forms of mobilization through citizen occupation of sites, such as “zones à défendre” (ZAD) in France. This pole is the critical stimulus to which authors who claim to be committed to ecological modernization regularly respond, adapting the ideas at the heart of the forum to distinguish themselves from ecomodernists. In Table 5.2, we compare these different political agendas by highlighting what they make visible. Indeed, since the ecological crisis is an anticipation, its promoters focus on its seeds to make it perceptible. These take the form of worrying environmental motives that are associated with motives characteristic of institutions considered responsible for the ecological crisis (institutional motives). These discourses also highlight practices considered virtuous (environmental motives that bring hope) that are based on institutions in the making, of which only a few signs can be perceived so far (institutional motives associated with the transition).

5 Seminar of the Red-Green study group in 2015 http://maydayrooms.org/event/red-greenstudy-group-meeting/, our translation.

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Ecological Ecomodernist modernization pole nucleus

Sustainable development pole

Ecosocialist pole

Pollution, climate and biogeochemical cycle disruption Environmental Waste of motives Fossil energy natural associated with consumption, Spatialized forms of environmental resources by areas of injustices underdeveloped certain concern regions industries Institutional motives associated with the ecological crisis

Environmental motives for hope

Institutional motives for transition

Inefficient production methods Underinvestment in clean production methods

Forms of equivalence between ecology and economy

Nuclear power plants, land sparing, ecoefficient technological innovations

Responsible consumption, selective sorting

Forms of green growth

Prevention policies, material flow accounting

Policy Contradictions compartmentalization, of capitalism, monopoly of treadmill of legitimate expertise, production, forms of social Jevons exclusion paradox Shared gardens, cooperatives Local food value chains

“Occupy” movements, anti-pollution mobilizations

Management in common property Local knowledge, participatory budgets

Subsistence economies, sobriety or degrowth

Table 5.2. Comparison of the environmental and institutional motives for the ecological crisis as perceived by the authors of ecomodernism, ecological modernization, ecosocialism and sustainable development

5.2.2. Forum dynamics This forum on ecological modernization was mainly fueled by arguments about power and resource distribution, i.e. democracy and political economy. In this process, little attention was paid to environmental considerations. Generic categories such as natural resources and energy have been poorly documented or contextualized. While biophysical sciences massively adopted a global framework to document climate and biodiversity change, academic debates on environmental policies and the ecological crisis

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have not produced an alternative framework. The intellectual effort was mainly focused on institutions. Ecosocialists have addressed their main criticisms of capitalism to ecological modernization. The accumulation logic would be a treadmill condemning any production company to increasingly gnaw at social and environmental achievements in order to preserve shareholders’ rents despite the erosion of margins in a competitive environment (Gould and Schnaiberg 1994, Schnaiberg 1980). The logic of profit would always be to the detriment of workers and the environment. This leads ecosocialists to state a (second6) ecological contradiction of capitalism. This mode of production would not provision for the renewal of the natural and social resources it needs. In order to defend ecological modernization, Arthur Mol responded by using Anthony Giddens’ distinction between capitalism and industrialization (1990). The treadmill logic, in his opinion, could only be attributed to industrialization. Mol acknowledged that industry needs to constantly transform nature, consume more energy and materials and control society. However, there are other forms of capitalism where growth is decoupled from these phenomena (Mol 1995, pp. 15–16). Ecosocialists doubt this decoupling (York and Rosa 2003). They blame the authors of ecological modernization for their focus on unrepresentative case studies and their inaccurate generalizations (Schnaiberg et al., 2002, p. 28)7. They argued for a more systematic study of this decoupling (Fisher and Freudenburg 2001) on a global scale and not on a product or state basis to avoid more ecological practices being offset by increased consumption8 or production offshoring. In response to this criticism, Arthur Mol proposed the sociology of environmental networks and flows (Mol 2008). This very optimistic proposal on the global circulation of information further strengthens the global framework. Although Arthur Mol associated ecological modernization with an abandonment of radical activism (Mol 2000), his followers more willingly recognized the need for ecological criticism for ecological modernization to 6 According to Marx, the first contradiction is the impoverishment of the proletariat at the expense of market demand. 7 “[It is] hard to distinguish between an ‘epidemic of reports’ and a ‘report of an epidemic’ of EM transformations” (Schnaiberg et al. 2002). 8 This rebound effect is also called the Jevons paradox, named after the English economist who observed this phenomenon about coal in the 19th Century (Jevons 1865).

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happen. David Toke (2011) showed that in Denmark, the development of wind power was the result of a mobilization of activists associated with technical high schools who illegally connected to the public distribution system to demonstrate their ability to supply electricity and obtained preferential rates for these cooperatives. David Gibbs (2000) took up the notion of “capacity for action” developed by Jänicke to reintroduce the strategic dimension of change. While in his early writings Martin Jänicke concluded that the state is failing in the environmental field, he now acknowledges that traditional regulatory instruments (prohibitions, control) have a role to play in promoting ecological innovation (Jänicke and Lindemann 2010). For Frederick Buttel (2000), the welfare state is also a necessary condition to influence the global market and promote ecological awareness through education. It should be noted that global terms prevail in all of these proposals. This debate seems to call for a “global shift” (Bérard 2015, Aykut and Dahan 2015) in environmental policies that would align any action in this field with global governance informed by the natural sciences. As Daniel Sarewitz states (2011) in a deliberately polemical article on the role of climate science, this global shift is implicitly accompanied by normative shifts that tend to impose liberal international governance. Because there would be a global and urgent carbon problem, we could not help but accept a supranational government. As the international consensus is rather neoliberal, the preferred policy instrument would be carbon taxation. It should be noted here that such reasoning makes several shortcuts. This is obviously not to deny the reality of the increase in CO2 content in the atmosphere, its effects and causes. However, this is not the only problem of humanity. Moreover, if climate science needs to abstract the different human activities from their context to translate them into carbon terms and sum up their contribution to the greenhouse effect, does this abstraction, useful to science, remain relevant for action? It is perhaps more relevant to reflect in each context on the future of territorialized activities that do not aim to transform the climate but that indirectly influence it rather than to respond to the ecological impact with an economic impact that is blind to the conditions of each territory. The principle of subsidiarity may also be relevant in terms of climate action.

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While in political science and environmental sociology, the liberal framing of climate change has not been addressed head-on, the controversy over this framing has been launched in the broader field of environmental humanities around the term “Anthropocene” (Dutreuil 2018). 5.3. The Anthropocene motive Using a term coined in the 19th Century, atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (2002) proposed to capture the ecological crisis through its geological effects by stating that the Earth had entered a new era, the Anthropocene. The term has been used and questioned by the geophysical community and widely criticized by philosophers, anthropologists and environmental historians. Let us analyze these debates by studying the Anthropocene as an environmental motive. The Anthropocene is an environmental motive according to our definition because it includes different forms perceived in the environment (measurable CO2 concentrations in air bubbles enclosed in ancient ice, retreat of glaciers, erosion forms characteristic of deforestation, etc.). These forms have very precise spatial and temporal outlines, even though the reference situation remains controversial. Beyond these concrete forms through which the Anthropocene manifests itself, this motive is a social representation that is characterized by a global framework. It conveys emotions, especially the fear of collapse. It is also a motive for action to decarbonize our economies. As an environmental motive, the Anthropocene is also a category that creates equivalence within it and distinction at its border. It allows essentialization. The prefix “anthropo”, which refers to the whole of humanity, makes all humans equivalent, even though in international climate agreements differentiated responsibilities are envisaged. This equivalence has been used to document and date the progression of anthropogenic impacts and all their manifestations in a general weighing effort (McNeill 2000). However, it has also been challenged because it masks those responsible for and benefitting from this environmental transformation. The word “Anthropocene” is considered inappropriate by several authors who consider that it is not the human species as a whole that is a geological force, but rather an industrial way of life, inaccessible to the poorest, that historically first appeared in the West and in capitalist economies (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013, Moore 2017).

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The debate has also focused on the reality of a common humanity sharing the same risks on a global scale. Should not we rather acknowledge that “as long as there are human societies on Earth (…), there will be lifeboats for the rich and the privileged”, allowing them to escape the effects of climate change and pollution (Malm and Hornborg 2014, Chakrabarty 2009, Keucheyan 2014)? Equivalence between humans also makes it possible to refer to the Western myth of Prometheus with his two contradictory figures, that of enlightenment and progress, on the one hand, and that of the vengeance of the gods or even of the apocalypse (in the common sense), on the other hand. This myth can be analyzed as an institutional motive. It is based on several communicative elements (the myth of Prometheus, the opposition between tradition and modernity). It is a motive to act (or not to act) that derives its justification from the reference to human rights and its promise of emancipation. However, it is a motive that has no precise form in the environment. According to the typology proposed in Chapter 1 (see Table 1.1), this motive is part of a totemic ontology in which the story serves as an explanation. The narrative of the progress of the human mind or the series of disasters that seem to conclude that the world is heading for global loss are two stories that undermine critical thinking. Adherence to the totemic motive prevents interest in the concrete forms of the environment and the processes that produce them, since attention to the morphology of things and their causality is rather a naturalistic ontology. For the followers of the narrative of progress, including the ecomodernists of the Breakthrough Institute (see section 5.2.1), the Anthropocene represents a new challenge that “humanity” will be able to solve thanks to new sources of energy and technical inventiveness. In this perspective, humanity must manage the biosphere: “there are some good reasons to suspect that the knowledge and speeches of the Anthropocene participate, in their turn, and perhaps without their knowledge, in a hegemonic system of representation of the world as a whole to be governed” (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013, p. 64) in order “to think of the Earth as a vast self-regulated cybernetic machine” (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013, p. 72). However, such a technical vision ignores inequalities between humans.

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The European Union energy policy feeds this story of progress by attributing the continent’s current level of development to its ability to mobilize secure, abundant and affordable energy. However, political ecologists see in this story a reinterpretation of history (Barca and Bridge 2015). There has never been safe, abundant and cheap energy. The true history of European industrialization would be that of a violent appropriation of land (colonization) and labor (slavery). The current energy supply would also be the result of an appropriation of fossil energy or nuclear fuel mines, often violent, where the risks associated with production are concentrated in relegation territories. Rendering all humans equivalent through the notion of progress would make it possible to conceal this imperialism and justify its maintenance. Rather than a “right for all” to a cheap resource or energy, a “management in common property” of natural resources (Bakker 2007), which allows everyone to live with dignity and without risk would probably lead to a decrease in the economies as we measure them, but this sobriety would be more in line with a humanist ideal. Playing on the definition of a motive to create distinction at its border, various authors have proposed less globalizing alternative terms, such as Capitalocene or Anglocene (Moore 2017, Haraway 2015, Fressoz 2013), which would blame certain actors, notably Great Britain, which was already responsible for 80% of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere in 1825 and 60% in 1850 (McNeill 2000). Timothy Mitchell (2011) also contrasted the nation states that developed on coal and those that already possessed oil. He suggested that the West, which developed with coal, benefited from material conditions more favorable to redistribution than the current oil-producing countries. Coal, which is difficult to transport other than by rail, encouraged a certain social mix in industrial cities close to the mines served by rail. The ability of the workers to block these transport routes was a determining factor in the construction of the welfare state. Fluid fossil energy transported by gas or oil pipelines would drive oil workers away from the decisionmaking centers of power exercised on their territory and make sabotage threats less credible. However, if coal workers may have been the indirect beneficiaries of carbon emissions in the past, they would be wrong to consider that this redistribution is definitively achieved. Mitchell reconceptualized the institutional basis of democracy in material terms by establishing a relationship of dependence between Western democracies and their oil consumption. The elected representatives are not the representatives of the people, but elites who could succeed in distinguishing themselves and

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making themselves known to the greatest number of people thanks to their high consumption of rapid transport (Mitchell 2011). The exercise of power is intimately linked to carbon emissions. The Anthropocene controversy also focused on the essentialization of the motive. The suffix “cene”, modeled on the categories of sedimentary stratigraphy (Eocene, Pleistocene, Holocene, etc.), inscribes the observed changes in an increasingly ineluctable geological temporality as time passes. The motive then reflects a dynamic more suffered than desired, against which political action seems as derisory as dinosaurs wishing to escape their destiny of extinction. This motive inspires collapsologists and renews the theories of radical political ecology (Dobson et al., 2014). It also generates “ecological anxiety” among biologists and ecologists analyzed in depth by Paul Robbins and Sarah Moore (2013). The predicted disaster would paralyze naturalist scientists because they would accuse themselves both of not having been militant enough in the face of environmental degradation and of having been too militant by forging concepts saturated with moral judgments. They would be caught up in two contradictory phobias: a form of anthropophobia that would make them hate the human species in the name of its impacts and a form of autophobia that would lead them to want to purge all the ecological concepts of their cultural representations, whether it is a lost Eden or a utilitarian functionalism. Robbins and Moore’s alternative proposal could result in: “dare to say what motives you want to defend!” The Anthropocene is both too general and too heterogeneous. It does not sufficiently describe the “monsters” and “gardens” that will be able to coexist there. We tend to ignore that there are “struggles” for the environmental motives to populate the Anthropocene (Robbins and Moore 2013, p. 12). To get out of anxiety, we must take on the political side of ecological restoration operations that have their winners and losers. In terms of motivations, the Anthropocene generates a variety of behaviors ranging from astonishment to opportunism, from cynicism to morbid desires, as well as survivalist forms of collective action. It is interesting to note that communities that “prepare for the change of the world” without panic or being overwhelmed propose very concrete policy choices such as the definition of common spaces where they can cultivate species that can embody a collective identity. Luc Sémal observes that the discussions of the workshops of the transition network “re-invigorate politics in its natural and technical environment” (Semal 2012, p. 44), i.e. they

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recreate environmental motives, in both senses of the term, forms and motivations. We saw in Chapter 3 that the environmental motive approach reveals the sedimentation of ways of seeing the environment by cold motives stabilized in law. In Chapter 4, we looked at the hot motives that revealed struggles in policy implementation. This chapter on the ecological crisis shows that the structure of future environmental policies is not only a question of values, institutional motives or instruments, but also of defining legitimate environmental forms. These motives will stabilize a way of talking about the world that will give visibility to certain realities while it will obscure other beings. These motives will also update a story that will or will not lead the actors to act.

Conclusion For a Political Approach to the Environment

In the environmental field, political changes do not necessarily translate into new instruments, but into new motives perceived and mobilized by stakeholders to understand what surrounds them. These social representations, which are based on perceptions, guide action and acquire a form of public recognition through their implementation in politics. We have identified six forms of politicization of environmental motives: crystallization when esthetic emotions related to these motives are made public; visibility that recognizes their specificity by distinction and learning; politicization that equates them with political values or interests; stabilization that inscribes them in public policies or instruments of public action; greening that imputes them an ecological cause or effect; and invisibility that erases their material traces in the public space. At the end of this political process, the normative nature of these environmental motives can be sanctioned by an authority (scientific or political). They then acquire a legitimate common sense. The actors perceive them as institutions. It becomes difficult to treat differently the elements grouped in one motive (equivalence) and, conversely, to assimilate things motives tend to differentiate (distinction). The existence of a motive in language makes it possible to think of this motive as the subject of a sentence, as responsible for a process (essentialization). Some motives are ecological, but this is not an intrinsic characteristic. Work carried out in political ecology has shown the eminently political nature of this imputation.

Politicization of Ecological Issues: From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives, First Edition. Gabrielle Bouleau. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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We propose a new definition of policy greening, that is the legitimate use of ecological reasoning applied to institutions. Our analysis shows that water policy in Europe has been greened and that this greening is more pronounced in some basins, such as the Rhône. This approach to the environment highlights a politics of motives, the main results of which are summarized here (section C.1). The categories of analysis we have developed shed light on the limits of approaches that create distance with the environment (section C.2). Our analysis has political implications for scientists whose mandate is to objectively describe the environment with categories that are all likely to become motives, i.e. embodied ways of effortlessly perceiving forms and associating motivations for action (section C.3). C.1. The politics of environmental motives By studying the political stakes of the environment in terms of their motives and the way in which the actors rework them politically, we have documented ways of transforming the perceived environment into a political stake. We have shown that what actors recognize in the environment are forms that correspond to words in language, which we have called environmental motives. Actors update the repertoire of relevant motives during the situation, in order to understand and act according to what they perceive. The visibility of certain motives does not only affect a view of the “mind”, but also a sensory perception that individuals constantly mobilize to understand what surrounds them in dialogue with their representations and the normative and ecological meanings associated with them. This approach places importance on the environment in question. It considers that there is a political stake in the construction of this presence and its interpretation. The construction of a dam is a technical action that has a political significance because it imposes a reality on residents’ view that reinforces the perception of a developed river motive. Of course, there is no determinism in this perception. Actors can act politically to make this motive illegitimate and consider beyond appearances another motive for a river. The motive itself is the result of a social construction. It is activated in individual consciences in a particular context, according to the elements present.

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The three case studies we have conducted on water quality control policy in Europe and funding practices in two water agencies confirm our initial hypothesis that taking into account sensitive dimensions through the notion of environmental motives makes it possible to renew the analysis of institutions in this field, and to highlight changes and differences that had gone unnoticed with other analytical frameworks. The environmental motives that have been instituted in the water quality control reflect significant changes. It was noted that the motive of the sacrificed river, which justified all authorizations to discharge into a watercourse, had disappeared. The number of rivers where accidental pollution is reported on the basis of fish mortality has been increased accordingly. The monitoring of the instituted motives also shows a transformation in France of the trout motive. Initially, it was a bargaining chip, thanks to the control of artificial fertilization, first between fishermen, then between fishermen and polluters via a system of civil and criminal transactions. Built on the fringes of any state intervention, this exchange system was then placed under the supervision of the state to establish a national fish farming territory that distinguished two categories of watercourses. Associated with first-class rivers, trout have come to represent good quality waters and then the environments where they can reproduce naturally. The link with rearing has thus gradually been disqualified by water quality control. The consideration of issues related to habitat fragmentation has been put on the agenda with the motive of (highly) migratory fish whose presence attests to ecological continuity. Eutrophication has also been introduced as a motive for public action at the European level, in particular through zoning and restrictions in discharge authorization orders. We can therefore, clearly see a trend towards taking better account of ecological considerations in French and European water policy. The motive approach also highlights regional differences in the way actors in the same type of organization interpret their environment and mission. It has been observed that the more mutualist functioning of the Seine-Normandie Water Agency is maintained by a strategy of politicization of the motive for the cash flow constraint, which presents it as an attack on basin solidarity and the principle of fair return. This motive of cash flow is highlighted by several policy choices: high subsidy rates that increase the risk of a surplus at the end of the financial year, an overvaluation of financial

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indicators and their generalization to all services. In comparison, the heads of the Rhône Méditerranée Corse water agency confined this motive to a dedicated service and depoliticized it by making a clear distinction between basin solidarity and fair return. In addition, the contrasting implications of the two agencies in terms of ecological restoration are justified by two opposing motives in the discourses of officials and researchers located at the science/policy interface of these two basins. On the Rhône side, these spokespersons regularly celebrate a Rhône identity through quotations from literary works that oppose the developed Rhône and the wild Rhône, ancient iconographies and metaphors that have become classic. Emotions related to the river are publicized by the RMC agency. The discourses essentialize the energy of the river and the Rhône becomes a motive for preserving spaces of freedom to maintain landscapes specific to the Rhône. In these different political processes, the Rhône’s identity is highlighted and greened to enhance river dynamics and condemn obstacles to them. This identity is associated with a mosaic of sites linked by the hydrographic network in which local expertise is politicized as a guarantee of appropriateness of public action. On the Seine side, it is more through the motive of the Paris conurbation that greening is thought of. It is the problems specific to the sanitation of this agglomeration that have motivated the scientific research programs on this river. The political work within the agency and PIREN Seine has consisted of finding forms of equivalence between different sources of pollution and depollution. For a long time, restoration problems were only politicized on the basis of their compatibility with the Parisian singularity and the interest of its spokespersons. By following environmental motives, we have enriched the typology of policy implementation modalities. Environmental motives are not only politicized and depoliticized, but can also be crystallized in their singularity, made visible/invisible, stabilized or ecologicalized (or greened). The crystallization of an environmental motive involves making public the esthetic emotion that this motive inspires to legitimize its singularity. To be visible, a motive requires distinction and learning. It also requires that the material traces of this motive in reality are present, otherwise the motive tends to disappear. A motive can also be made invisible by its equivalence with others. More traditionally in political science, an environmental motive can be politicized by aligning with values or interests and thus mounted in generality. It can also be stabilized by co-production with other institutions.

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Finally, we have shown that there is no intrinsic specificity to ecological motives and that it is possible to green any environmental or institutional motive by attributing an ecological cause or effect to it. The motive approach has also proved fruitful in analyzing the academic forum of ideas on the ecological crisis and the debates on the notion of the Anthropocene (the epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact as the Earths ecosystems). Beyond the value clashes between neoliberals and ecosocialists, the intellectuals who debate these issues do not see in the environment the same reasons for concern or hope. These differences make it possible to map nuanced positions and discourse developments. Critics of ecological modernization traditionally approach it as a unified political project, whereas it is more accurate to see it as a project that is reinterpreted by the actors who join the network of its discussion. Thus qualified, ecological modernization is more an institution perceived according to an analogical relationship than an ideological block. The environmental and institutional motives associated with it make it possible to identify several versions and differentiate it from the green economy. By approaching the Anthropocene as an environmental motive, we understand that what is at stake in the institutionalization or not of this term is an equivalence of humans without differentiation of historical responsibility and the essentialization of an industrial era towards which any political action seems derisory. Other environmental motives are probably more motivating for action and more likely to do justice to different development trajectories that have generated significant inequalities. Finally, our work partly explains the difficult institutionalization of the environment, through the causes of instability of environmental motives. Ecological causality imputation localizes environmental motives in the biophysical world. This makes the outline of motives relatively unstable because ecological phenomena evolve in space and the perception of outlines is particularly sensitive to scale and observational conventions. The perceived discrepancies between what has been instituted and what is seen, touched, felt or heard are, therefore, opportunities for repoliticization. Nevertheless, our examples show forms of stabilization of these environmental motives in social collectives that give them a more symbolic meaning. Some environmental motives acquire a quasi-mythological existence for a collective that perceives itself as a clan (totemic ontology). Others are perceived as exchange agreements between the supportive

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members of a group (animic ontology). Still others see it as a mobilizing project that gives meaning to an entire network (analogical ontology). Our examples also test the hypothesis of a plurality of ontologies associated with each motive. The perception of the same environmental motive may thus be a naturalistic, totemic or animistic ontology, or even analogical as in the case of ecological modernization. Naturalistic ontology tends to destabilize motives because it links them to causalities on which it is possible to act. On the contrary, animic ontology places them in a temporal permanence that tends to discourage any investigation. Totemic ontology associates motives with a territorial identity or an idealized nature that stabilizes them on a spatial level. Analogical ontology localizes the motive in a future that must be brought about, which involves the observer working to realize the motive. C.2. The limits of an abstract approach to the environment By highlighting these motives and showing their importance in political work, we contrast the limitations of an approach with the environment based on abstract categories. In political science, the environment is often reduced to the question of humanity’s relationship with wild nature. However, as Celine Granjou reminds us (2016), nature is not an immutable framework in which humans invent their future, but an evolving matrix that transforms as much as it is transformed. The wolf whose behavior we thought we knew surprises us with its inventiveness. Humanity must deal with this uncontrolled aspect that constantly arises. The environment is not an inert material to be shaped, but a space that contains shapes, some of which evolve independently of any human intentionality. In terms of both legal and regulatory science, there are attempts to delimit this specific field where nature emerges to better govern it. These efforts aim to distance the environment to extract generic categories that can be used to establish universal rules or tools. However, this work of abstraction tends to make disappear what makes the specificity of the living environment, its materiality, its reactivity and its unpredictability.

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Environmental positions aimed at imputing universal rights to nature (section C.2.1), monitoring nature with generic tools (section C.2.2) or addressing it on a global scale (section C.2.3) seem to us to miss what makes the environment and its vitality specific. C.2.1. Imposing universal rights on natural entities Several legal innovations aim to give natural entities universal rights. In 2008, Ecuador adopted a constitution that recognized nature’s right to exist, to persist, to maintain and to regenerate its evolving life cycles, structure, functions and processes. The Maori of New Zealand obtained by treaty in 2017 that the Te Awa Tupua River in the north of the island should have the same legal status as a human being, in accordance with their world view by which this river is the ancestor of the Whanganui tribe. According to essayist Peter Sloterdick (2013), Europe would be the only place where humans are right-holder beings while nature is the place where they assert their rights. In order to preserve the environment, it may be tempting to claim rights for nature based on universal human rights. However, the universality of these categories requires that non-human entities be included in an abstractly defined set in order to be able to accommodate other entities with the same rights. Yan Thomas (1998) explains that the universal rights granted to humans do not concern real people but legal fictions, asset managers and points of attribution of rights and obligations. Even when it comes to the rights of natural persons, the subject of law is not the individual embodied in all his concrete complexity, but the chimera made up of all the written traces produced by the rule of law on this individual. In this respect, the legal subject resembles more the legal person of a private company than a being of flesh. To better protect living species, should the beneficiaries of these universal abstract rights be extended to trees (Stone, 2010), animals (Chapouthier and Nouët, 1997) or living environments (Descola, 2008)? Will the chimeras that will represent these living beings in court cases be able to reflect their complexity (Farinetti, 2012)? If the law does not judge on the reality in question, but on a credible representation of this reality according to universalist legal categories, then addressing the issue of preserving the environment in terms of extending human rights to environmental entities is another way to distance the environment.

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As Yan Thomas points out, “[in classical and then medieval Roman law] personification was used to impute rights, not to protect things” (Thomas, 1998, p. 93). Codified European law offers other forms of protection than those reserved for legal persons. Provided they are “made into things”, “socionatures” can be declared legally non-amendable, non-appropriable and non-commercial. Just as justice requires individuals to formulate their demands in impersonal terms, so it can recognize special status for particular things (unavailability, inalienability). This is the case for public goods declared the common heritage of humanity, which cannot be appropriated, destroyed or sold. The Convention on Biological Diversity initiated by UNESCO, signed in 1992, did not recognize biodiversity as such (Aubertin and Vivien, 1998), but this does not exclude an incremental process in which different forms of biodiversity would be progressively excluded from the market, made unavailable and/or inalienable. Rather than dealing with this issue in a generic way by placing the environment at a distance, we can study the political work necessary to have the singularity of a “socionature” recognized and given a particular status. Our research tends to show that this work lies not only in the politicization of this “socionature” in the form of a motive and in particular its rise to singularity by distinction and crystallization, but also in the opposition to certain forms of rendering things equivalent for accounting purposes in the implementation of public policies. C.2.2. Monitoring nature through calculation The permanent emergence of novelty in the environment calls for greater vigilance. But how can this vigilance be organized in environmental monitoring policies? The promise made by the environmental sociology of networks and flows (Mol, 2008) and by the promoters of big data is that such emergence of new natural forms can be captured by the multiplication of individual data and the increase in computing capacities. These tools will make it possible to visualize how phenomena recorded at different scales and by different actors, all combine and organize themselves in new forms, with unexpected dynamics.

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However, a data is a value assigned to a variable that is already known and monitored. While the combination of several variables can lead to the emergence of phenomena that were previously poorly identified, the new one also emerges in the interstices of these variables, where there are no appropriate encoding procedures. Existing procedures ignore this novelty. They detect an impossibility of categorization or assimilate it to something else already known. The specificity of this novelty remains “outside the radars”. Environmental monitoring must therefore continually compromise between established protocols that allow for intercomparison and cumulative knowledge, and the adaptation of these protocols to capture what has emerged in the meantime (Bouleau et al., 2009). Environmental observation is always partial, formatted and targeted. But adaptation is expensive. Routinely, it is the recycling of established procedures that prevails. This inertia produces ignorance, wherever the aggregation grid of measures is insufficient to identify phenomena that go unnoticed by public authorities (Gramaglia and Babut, 2014). This ignorance has social effects because there are actors disadvantaged by the available data, due to their incompleteness. It also has ecological effects because monitoring encourages public action that is probably unnecessary and sometimes harmful, when it confuses a motive with another one. We cannot seek to optimize by calculation a process that is intrinsically political when it is part of a struggle to have a new form recognized and to associate it with meaning for action. C.2.3. Addressing the environment in a global way The globalization of problems also distances us from the environment. The planet is often said to be the only correct scale for these issues. However, if this scale is relevant for an observation, an alarm or even a desire for a new model for living together, it does not constitute a territory for political legitimization. Global environmental governance remains largely disconnected from public policies (Aykut and Dahan, 2015). Environmental public action must take up the concrete challenge of articulating spatial scales (Lascoumes, 2012).

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For actors whose legitimacy of action is part of a register of proximity or conviviality (Faburel, 2015), the global scale is not a legitimate reference frame. Indeed, if we look for the modalities of political enunciation of a global environmental issue, it is possible that it is totally absent at a local level. In his study on emerging ways of adapting to climate change, Vincent Marquet (2014) noted, for example, the low visibility of this issue in public debates and the institutional scenes of water policy in France and Quebec. Other, smaller territories seem more appropriate. Individuals acquire their habits of doing and thinking in specific places of socialization. It is in these places, and in the political territories that legitimize relations between governments and governed that environmental mobilizations are rooted, that public environmental decisions make sense. The global environment remains at a distance from these political territories. Environmental motives offer more opportunities to articulate spatial scales of public action. It is possible to find forms and motivations to which local political collectives are attached that are intertwined, with more generic motives that can be perceived and defended at other levels. As we will see now, this approach also involves some commitment. C.3. Political consequences for scientists By attaching particular characteristics to each motive ontology, we would like to contribute to a greater reflexivity of scientists in the way they choose their motives for investigation. Indeed, through the explanatory registers associated with the ontologies of motives, through their inscription in time or space and through the more or less vague nature of their outlines, the motives take on more or less responsibility for diversity issues (section C.3.1) and the democratization of knowledge (section C.3.2). Finally, insofar as the perception of motives also proceeds through repetition and accumulation, it is also up to scientists to be reflexive about the framing that is conveyed by the motives they make visible (section C.3.3). C.3.1. Motives more or less favorable to diversity The evolution of motives for water quality control and the comparison of policies in the two water agencies show that some forms of accounting are detrimental to the preservation of biodiversity. This is the case for the

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financial indicators used to technically manage the cash flow of the water agencies. In terms of budget programming, any expenditure is equivalent to another of the same amount regardless of its effect on the environment. This is also the case for forms of civil and criminal transactions that reduce the blame for environmental sanctions. The financial compensation for the disappearance of a living being suggests compensation in an area where there are strong irreversible consequences. Certain environmental motives have been introduced to make some distinctions legitimate so that things related to different motives cannot be considered equivalent. The trout motive in water quality control and the Rhône identity motive in the RMC Agency’s policy suggest that totemic motives, i.e. associated with a territorial identity with relatively vague spatial outlines, are more conducive to taking ecology into account in public action. These motives are easily articulated in a discourse on the promotion of a singularity. On the contrary, animist motives, which are based on intentions and exchange agreements, are more related to economic reasoning than ecological rationality. These observations should be confirmed by more systematic research on other environmental motives, taking into account their ontology and the modalities of their implementation in policy. Research in this direction would allow early discussion of the scales, outlines and equivalence conventions chosen in environmental research projects based on the policy issues identified. Indeed, while the consistency of these motives does not predetermine the institutions that will be chosen, it is clear from the examples presented in this book that diversity in general and biodiversity in particular will be more or less well addressed by some ontologies. C.3.2. Motives more or less accessible to the public The notion of a motive is also interesting to mobilize when studying the role of non-specialists in environmental regulation. The more equipment a motive requires to be perceived, the less accessible it is to amateurs. The choice of the legitimate motive for public action, therefore, guides the more or less confined nature of expertise. The motive for fish mortality has facilitated the involvement of amateur fishermen in pollution control. The standard set by the European Water Framework Directive in 2000 is based

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on a motive for the good status of water bodies, which can only be assessed by experts. The study of the forms invested by research and their perception by different audiences could offer a new perspective on the interfaces between science and policy in the environmental field. It would be possible to analyze the exchanges in terms of proposing and selecting these worthy forms of research by paying attention to the effects of these choices on the audiences who will be able to perceive them. Conversely, it is interesting to observe the political work of actors who seize on the research to think in ecological terms of ordinary forms or to prevent this greening by disqualifying the research that would contribute to it. The environment is also characterized by a tension between its ordinary perception and the technological equipment necessary for its expert monitoring. The visibility and understanding of phenomena often requires the deployment of costly techniques that tend to dissociate scientific knowledge from ordinary perception. The gap between the two modes of perception is problematic, making it difficult for non-specialist audiences concerned with the consequences of research to access knowledge. It also deprives scientists of knowledge produced by practice (Wynne, 1996) which is crucial to action. Finally, it undermines a motivation for collective action based on the adjustment of perceptions and representations. The hybrid forums set up to encourage exchanges between specialized researchers and amateurs who have become specialists (Callon et al., 2001) find their limits in the environmental field, for which it is very difficult to define the population concerned a priori. Cécilia Claeys-Mekdade gives the example of the debates around a bridge project in the Camargue that has mobilized residents as much as an international community attached to the insularity of the Camargue (Claeys-Mekdade, 2001). To account for this plurality of mobilizations, we must agree to define the environment in a relative way. There are several Camargue environments. A daily Camargue environment for the inhabitants of Salin-de-Giraud who would be able to save travel time with a bridge and an exceptional Camargue environment for the international collective of opponents to this bridge. The identification of planetary biogeochemical phenomena tends to focus environmental issues on a global scale and accentuate the disconnection of learned forms from ordinary perception. Over the past few centuries, scientists have adopted common conventions to measure the quantities of

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water, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus, to estimate the average temperature of the planet and its biodiversity. Thanks to these conventions, they have managed to draw up a report on the current ecological crisis and its causes: the problem is global. The terms used to describe the ecological crisis (biodiversity, climate) are global. The planet has become the reference. “Climatic facts are established through impersonal observation while meaning arises from the situated experience. Climate science cuts through reality without respecting the potential for common sense and thus undermines existing institutions and ethical commitments (…)” (Jasanoff, 2010, p. 233, italics added). The realities to which chemists, physicists and ecologists give meaning with their technical tools are not very noticeable to many people. This is the challenge of citizen or participatory sciences (Charvolin et al., 2007), to reconnect with the perceptions of amateurs. Let us provide an example. In the Ciron valley in France (Gironde), well known for the Sauternes that winegrowers produce there, the area occupied by beech wood is decreasing. Any amateur botanist can see this. However, this beech wood has an intraspecific genetic diversity that is not very visible to the naked eye, as high as that observed throughout the rest of Europe. The specificity of the Ciron beech forest is only accessible to holders of genetic sequencing tools. The political challenge for ecologists and beech wood activists in the Ciron Valley is to share with the valley’s inhabitants the conviction that every beech currently present counts, that it cannot be replaced by any other, while genotypic differences cannot be seen. An association combining scientists and amateurs has taken charge of harvesting the valley’s beech according to a practice that optimizes diversity collection, organizes sowing and the production of young plants that are then distributed in schools accompanied by a story on the specificity of this beech forest. In this way, scholarly discourse on genotypic diversity plays an important role, but which also calls for a territorial identity and individual commitment. Not all young people will plant a beech tree, but the association relies on a few enthusiasts to maintain diversity through specific attachments. For the modern abstractions of the different possible genetic combinations of beech DNA, it has substituted a plurality of people and singular attachments. For each tree to manifest the hidden message of its DNA, not only the ecological conditions must be met for the tree to develop, but also favorable social conditions must be in place for amateurs to pay attention to it. This example

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echoes observations that some fruit trees embody a family history (Peluso, 1996) due to their longevity, immobility and size, as well as the associated harvesting and cooking practices that make this element of nature a social history, exchange relationships and territory. C.3.3. For a non-culturalist approach to institutional and environmental motives Institutional and environmental motives are the result of political investments. To perceive a motive, you must have learned about it. This requires time, mobilization, institutional support and routine. However, this never means that the repertoire of established motives determines the future. Through the interplay of scales and outlines, the categories that describe the environment are always plural and political actors know how to grasp the different modes of politicization of motives to show a reality that suits them. Scientists rarely question this political work on motives. They sometimes reuse existing ones without necessarily questioning what this recycling produces politically. This is particularly the case when they use the cultural factor to explain differences between two contexts. When the analyst cannot explain the political variations they observe in different situations by the effects of inertia, the interests of the actors and the ideas they promote, the cultural factor is sometimes invoked as a last resort. In La fabrique du conformisme, Éric Maurin (2015) studies the regional and local differences that can be observed in the areas of work attendance and school dropout. He notes that the world of work conveys a culturalist interpretation that sees a “southern” tendency towards absenteeism. Similarly, the world of education culturally associates early school leaving with disadvantaged areas. Éric Maurin argues that individual behaviors are sensitive to the environment, but especially to their very close environment. Office relationships between colleagues, and friendships between high school students would be much more significant than anything that could be part of a larger territory, due to the influence of “leaders” in these groups. Absenteeism and early school leaving can be considered as institutions more or less perceived by the actors according to their local environment. It is not in “the South” in general or in all “disadvantaged areas” that absenteeism or early school leaving exists, but within small groups whose leaders find in culturalist discourse a legitimizing resource to highlight the motives that suit them.

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The visibility of motives also proceeds by accumulation. The more frequently a motive is encountered, the easier it is to perceive it. This may seem to support the culturalist theory. Nevertheless, institutionalization does not proceed by imitation, but by legitimization of motives by those in positions of authority. In this perspective, culturalist interpretation is a justification argument for establishing a motive by equating the group with its environment. The opposite justification, which consists of distinguishing the group from its environment, requires another argument that values singularity and agency. This reflection is in line with the work on the militant use of statistics (Bruno et al., 2015, Bezes et al., 2016, Bruno et al., 2014). Indeed, the environment can be grasped through several motives, at different analytical levels and according to different quantification modalities (Bouleau and Deuffic, 2016). To take a step back on the political effects of this quantification of the social or natural environment, it is necessary to identify the equivalences or distinctions that are made according to the statistics that the authorities choose to use. The motives we have examined in Chapters 3 and 4 are not cultural. There are initiatives within the Seine-Normandie Agency that aim to collect the testimonies and emotions of people living along the Seine in order to highlight the river’s unique features. There are also attempts to homogenize budget management in the Rhône-Méditerranée Corse agency. Nor does the evolution of water quality control policy over the past two centuries reflect a general greening of society that would continue without political work. Part of this work is the responsibility of interdisciplinary scientific teams who agree to question the ecological causes and effects of institutional motives. Another part of this work is to highlight the unique motives that show that change is possible. By the motives they choose to study and by those they refer to in their causal reasoning, researchers demonstrate a form of political commitment to the culturalist theories that exist in their field. Based on the fields studied in Europe, this book contradicts the comparative work that makes France a culturally unfavorable country for taking ecological issues into account. This culture is not a foregone conclusion. More broadly, this book invites scientists to be more suspicious of the cultural factor that tends to naturalize

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forms and motives. By invoking this factor, the visibility of these forms and motives is increased in some territories. The words, forms and motives already present to describe an environment and give it meaning are only one of the resources available for researchers’ work. It is always possible to invent new ones. Forging new ways of perceiving is also one of the mandates of research.

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Politicization of Ecological Issues: From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives, First Edition. Gabrielle Bouleau. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Index

A, B, C affordance, 13, 14 angling, 51, 56, 58, 60–62, 64–73, 75, 80, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88 authorization, 50–55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 72, 78, 86 belly-up fish, 64, 65, 76, 77 cash flow constraint, 103–105, 107, 108, 118, 119 categorization, 24, 25, 27, 30, 32, 33, 35–38, 42, 45 configuration, 90, 91, 98, 99, 104 conservative, 53, 59, 60, 63 crystallization, 23, 25, 45, 46 D, E, F deterrent, 94 distinction, 33, 36–38, 43, 45, 46, 135, 137, 139 eco-modernism, 127, 128 ecological modernization, 124–135 strong, 128 weak, 127, 128 ecologization, 28 ecosocialism, 133–135 emotion, 9–11, 21

equivalence, 33, 36–38, 43, 45, 46, 108, 116, 119, 121, 134, 137, 138 essentialization, 33, 38, 45, 46, 137, 140 evidence-based policy, 125 fair return, 95, 105, 106, 108, 115, 118–120 fishing, see angling framing, 24, 26, 28, 31–33 G, I, L, M generalization, 103, 107, 108, 111, 119, 120 green economy, 125, 127, 128 greening, 23, 26, 28, 30, 39–41, 45, 46 incentive, 94, 97, 100, 101 industrialist, 52, 54, 60, 61, 63, 76 institution, 4–6, 15–21 liberalism, 59–61, 64–67 lock-in, 97, 98 monetarization, 52, 61, 63, 67, 87 monetary compensation, 50–52 monitoring, 50–52, 54, 57, 58, 68, 73, 75, 82, 85–87 motif, 8–10, 12, 16

Politicization of Ecological Issues: From Environmental Forms to Environmental Motives, First Edition. Gabrielle Bouleau. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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motivation, 10–12, 13–15, 20, 21 mutualist, 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 106, 107, 120

prohibition, 50–52, 57, 60, 64, 65, 67, 73, 83, 86, 87 quality control policy, 50, 65, 77, 83, 85, 88

N, O, P, Q nationalism, 65 ontology analogical, 17–20 animic, 17–20 naturalistic, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20 totemic, 17–20 political work, 23, 33, 35, 42, 43, 45, 46 progress, 128, 132, 138, 139

S, V, Z singularity/specificity, 23, 111, 112, 114, 121 stability, 23, 26, 30, 31, 38, 40–47 sustainable development, 126, 129, 132, 134 visibility, 23, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36–41, 45, 46 zoning, 50–52, 67–69, 77, 86, 87

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